Who is Jack The Ripper

Jack The Rippers Known Victims

Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, murdered on Bucks' Row, Friday, August 31, 1888.

Annie Chapman, murdered at 29 Hanbury Street, Saturday, September 8, 1888.

Elizabeth Stride, murdered on Berner Street, Sunday, September 30, 1888.

Catharine Eddowes, murdered in Mitre Square, Sunday, September 30, 1888.

Mary Jane (Marie Jeanette) Kelly, murdered at Number 13 Miller's Court, Friday, November 9, 1888.

A number of other murders of prostitutes took place in the same are until 1891.These are dismissed by UK researchers although they were claimed to still be victims of Jack The Ripper by the French Press.

An eminent South African historian believes he has stumbled on the identity of Jack the Ripper.

From the Discovery Channel -
"Eminent Historian Charles van Onselen said at first he wasn't sure he wanted to publicize the conclusions he drew when he noticed parallels in the century-old, unsolved Ripper case and the background of Joseph Silver, who terrorized women as "King of the Pimps" in Johannesburg.

"I was left with a choice: I have got intelligent speculation, which I think is pretty long way down the track to proving that this guy was the Ripper. Do I include or exclude it?"

Montague John Druitt

Montague John DruittMontague John Druitt (August 15, 1857-December 1, 1888).
born in Wimborne Minster, Dorset, England, the son of a prominent local physician. Having received his B.A. from the University of Oxford in 1880, he was admitted to the bar in 1885. Worked as an assistant schoolmaster at George Valentine's boarding school, 9 Eliot Place, Blackheath from 1881 until he was dismissed shortly before his death in 1888.

His body was found floating in the River Thames at Chiswick on December 31, 1888. Medical examination suggested that his body was kept at the bottom of the river for several weeks by stones placed in his pockets.
His disappearance and death shortly after the fifth and last canonical murder (which took place on November 9, 1888) and alleged "private information" led some of the investigators of the time to suggest he was the Ripper, thus explaining the end to the series of murders. More recently some have expressed doubts if he committed suicide or was murdered.

George Chapman

He was born Seweryn Antonovich K%u0142osowski in Poland, and assumed the name of Chapman in 1887and worked as a barber (this was fairly common in Victorian England as immigrants from Eastern Europe anglicised their names to better fit in with local people). He was foundguilty of poisoning three women (his wives), for which he was hanged in 1903. He was Abberline's favoured suspect, could well be a likely suspect. He fitted some descriptions of men seen walking with the victims, and to have had the medical skills needed to commit the mutilations; however, the main argument against him is the fact that he murdered his three wives with poison, and it is uncommon (though not unheard of) for a serial killer to make such a drastic change in modus operandi.He lived in Whitechapel.

Aaron Kosminski
Born in K%u0142odawa Poland.A member of London's Polish Jewish population,
Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten's memoranda, stated that there were strong reasons for suspecting him, that he "had a great hatred of women, with strong homicidal tendencies", and that he strongly resembled "the man seen by a City PC" near Mitre Square He was named as a suspect This is the only mention of any such sighting, and it has been suggested by some authors that Macnaghten really meant the City Police witness Joseph Lawende

Aaron Kosminski was transferred to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum in February 1891.
Sir Robert Anderson and former Chief Inspector Donald Swanson claimed that the Ripper had been identified by the "only person who had a good view of the murderer", though many authors express skepticism that this alleged identification ever happened, for a variety of reasons. Anderson and Swanson further stated that no prosecution was possible because the witness was not willing to offer testimony against a fellow Jew. In marginalia in his copy of the memoirs, Swanson said that this man was "Kosminski", adding that he had been watched at his brother's home in Whitechapel by the City police, that he was taken to the asylum with his hands tied behind his back, and that he died shortly after. These last two details are quite untrue of Aaron Kosminski, who lived until 1919. His insanity took the form of auditory hallucinations, a paranoid fear of being fed by other people, and a refusal to wash or bathe.

Kosminski also meets many of the criteria in the general profile of serial killers as outlined by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal profiler John Douglas and Robert Ressler, including compulsive masturbation, unsteady employment, and absence of a biological father (his father died when Kosminski was eight years old). He also lived close to the sites of the murders. He was described as harmless in the asylum, although he had once brandished a chair at asylum attendants. He was previously reputed to have threatened his sister with a knife. These two incidents are the only known indications of violent behaviour.

Michael Ostrog
He was born in Russia in 1833 and was a professional con-man .
He used numerous aliases and disguises and was mentioned as a suspect by Macnaghten, who joined the case in 1889, the year after the "canonical five" victims were killed.He was jailed for petty offences in France during the Ripper murders. Ostrog is last mentioned alive in 1904, though his date of death is uncertain.

John Pizer
Pizer was a Polish Jew who worked as a bootmaker in Whitechapel. After the first two Ripper murders, Police Sergeant William Thick brought Pizer in for questioning. Thick apparently believed that Pizer was a man known as "Leather Apron", a local man who was notorious for committing minor assaults on prostitutes. In the early days of the Whitechapel murders many locals suspected that "Leather Apron" was the killer. He was cleared of any suspicion when it turned out that at the time of one of the murders he had been talking with a police officer as they watched a spectacular fire on the London Docks. Pizer claimed that Thick had known him for years, and implied that his arrest was based on animosity and not evidence.

Francis Tumblety
"Dr" Francis Tumblety (c. 1830/3-1903). Seemingly uneducated or self-educated Irish/American raised from an infant in Rochester N.Y., he earned a small fortune posing as a quack doctor throughout the United States and Canada and occasionally travelling across Europe as well. Perceived as a misogynist, he was connected to the deaths of some of his patients and charged by the authorities in Canada but skipped the country. . He was also charged with supplying herbs to procur an illegal abortion. He gained a reputation for his eccentric, ostentatious clothes frequently of a military nature. He was arrested and incarcerated in the Old Capitol Prison, Washington, for complicity in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln but released upon the plea of mistaken identity.

Tumblety was in England in 1888 and had visited the country on other occasions during one such earlier trip he became closely acquainted with a famous Victorian writer Thomas Henry Hall Caine with whom it was suggested he had an affair and from whom he tried to borrow money as his finances had become precarious. He was arrested on November 7, 1888, on charges of "gross indecency", apparently for engaging in homosexuality. Awaiting trial, he instead fled the country for France on November 24, 1888. It has been suggested that he was released in time for the murder of Mary Jane Kelly (on November 9). Notorious in the United States for his scams including selling forged Union military discharge papers during the American Civil War and impersonating an army officer, news of his arrest led some to suggest he was the Ripper.

Tumblety was mentioned as having been a prime Ripper suspect by former Detective Chief Inspector John George Littlechild of the Metropolitan Police in a letter to journalist and author, George R. Sims dated September 23, 1913. Claims that Scotland Yard sent an officer to the United States in 1888 to try to bring Tumblety back in connection with the crimes have been disputed by recent research, although there are anecdotal American newspaper reports to suggest that this was the case. One common objection to Tumblety's viability as a suspect lies with his alleged homosexuality, since in general male homosexual serial killers kill other men and not women.

He died in a St Louis hospital in 1903 possibly of syphilis and is buried in Rochester N.Y.

Various other people were named at the time as potentially being guilty of the Whitechapel murders by journalists and others. Some of the most notable are:

b>William Henry Bury
William Henry Bury (25 May 1859-24 April, 1889). Having recently relocated to Scotland from London, he strangled his wife Ellen Elliot, a former prostitute, on 5 February, 1889, inflicted deep wounds to her abdomen after she was dead and "packed" her into a wooden box, which he subsequently used as a table to play dominoes on. She remained in the box and Bury went about his normal life for almost a week before reporting the murder to the local police on 10 February. Some people believe the wounds were similar to ones inflicted upon Martha Tabram and Mary Ann Nichols. In fact Bury claimed the reason he inflicted these wounds and packed her in the wooden box was because he was frightened that people would think he was Jack the Ripper. Bury was hanged soon afterwards in Dundee, having by then made a full confession to his wife's murder. His was to be the last hanging in the city.

Thomas Neill Cream
Dr Thomas Neill Cream (May 1850-15 November 1892), doctor secretly specialising in abortions. Born in Scotland, educated in London, active in Canada and later in Chicago, Illinois, United States. In 1881 he was found to be responsible for fatally poisoning several of his patients of both sexes.
In 1881 he was found to be responsible for fatally poisoning several of his patients of both sexes. Originally there was no suspicion of murder in these cases, but Cream himself demanded an examination of the bodies. This was apparently an attempt to draw attention to himself. Imprisoned in the Illinois State Penitentiary, in Joliet, Illinois, he was released on 31 July, 1891, on good behaviour. Moving to London, he resumed his murderous activities and was arrested. He was hanged on 15 November, 1892. According to some sources, his last words were reported as being "I am Jack...", interpreted to mean Jack the Ripper, but the words were muffled by a hood. Experts note that this whole incident may be nothing more than a story invented at a later date, as police officials who attended the execution made no mention of this alleged interrupted confession. He was still imprisoned at the time of the Ripper murders, but some authors have suggested that he could have bribed officials and left the prison before his official re

The London Police were under GREAT pressure to solve the Ripper case. After all how would it look for the Capital City of the British Empire to have a mass murderer at large ?
So here are some of the more unusual suspects they looked at ...

Frederick Bailey Deeming
Frederick Bailey Deeming (30 July 1842-23 May, 1892), sailor living at the time in Sydney, Australia, with his wife and four children. A British citizen, Deeming was brought to court in England on 15 December 1887, on charges of bankruptcy. Sentenced to fourteen days imprisonment, he was apparently released on 29 December, 1887, and promptly fled with his family to Cape Town, South Africa to escape debt collectors. Soon after arrival he was brought to the attention of the local police on charges of fraud. He sent his family to England and headed to recently founded Johannesburg, disappearing for a time from historical record. There is no reliable account of his activities or his whereabouts between March 1888 and October 1889 (covering the period of the murders). He resurfaced in Kingston upon Hull back in England, where he was known by the name of Harry Lawson, one of his many aliases. Well into a career as a professional con man, he apparently attempted to reconcile with his estranged wife. They moved together with their children to a rented house in Rainhill in July 1891. The reconciliation ended on 11 August, 1891, when he cut his wife and children's throats as they slept. Having introduced himself to the locals as a bachelor and his family as his visiting sister and nephews, it proved easy to explain their absence. He wooed Emily Mathers, his landlord's daughter, and they married on 22 September, 1891. The newlyweds left by ship from Southampton, on 2 November 1891, and arrived in Victoria (Australia) on 15 December, 1891. He murdered Emily on 24 December, 1891, buried her under their rented house, and left. Her body was soon found, resulting in a local investigation and the discovery of the other bodies in England. This led to his arrest on 11 March, 1892, and his trial and subsequent execution by hanging. The public of Australia was convinced he was the Ripper. He is said to have been an acquaintance of victim Catherine Eddowes and to have maintained correspondence with her, but this allegation remains unproven.

Carl Feigenbaum
Carl Feigenbaum was arrested in 1894 in New York, United States, for cutting a woman's throat. After his execution his lawyer claimed that Feigenbaum had admitted to having a hatred of women and a desire to kill and mutilate them. The lawyer further stated that he believed Feigenbaum was Jack the Ripper. This theory gained some press coverage at the time, but was disputed by the lawyer's partner, and the idea was not pursued for more than a century. Author Trevor Marriott, a former British police murder squad detective, argues in the second edition of his book, Jack The Ripper - The 21st Century Investigation that Feigenbaum was in Whitechapel at the time of the Ripper murders and also that he was responsible for other similar murders in the United States and Germany between 1891 and 1894.

Robert Donston Stephenson
(aka Roslyn D'Onston) (20 April 1841-9 October 1916). A journalist and writer known to be interested in the occult and black magic. He arrived as a patient at the Whitechapel Workhouse Infirmary shortly before the murders started, and left shortly after they ceased. He is the author of a newspaper article and letter to the police concerning the case. His strange manner and interest in the crimes resulted in an amateur detective reporting him to Scotland Yard. Two days later he visited them himself to report his own suspect, a Dr Morgan Davies. Subsequently he fell under the suspicion of newspaper editor William Thomas Stead, the writer Mabel Collins and her friend Baroness Vittoria Cremers. Author and historian Melvin Harris argued in his two most recent books that Donston was a leading suspect.

Several other names have been mentioned as possibly being the killer in the years after the murders. They include:

Joseph Barnett
Joseph Barnett (1858-1926), a one-time fish porter. He was victim Mary Jane Kelly's lover from 8 April, 1887, to 30 October, 1888, when they quarreled and separated. He visited her daily afterwards, reportedly trying to reconcile. There are suspicions that he was denied. He was proposed as a suspect for her murder as a scorned lover, although some people attribute the other murders to him as well. His accounts about what Kelly is said to have told him about her life constitute most of what is known of her. The validity of both her statements and his reports have been questioned.

Lewis Carroll
Lewis Carroll (pen name of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, 27 January 1832-14 January 1898), author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass; named as a suspect based upon anagrams author Richard Wallace devised for his book Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend, which is not generally taken seriously by other scholars.

David Cohen
David Cohen (1865-1889). A Polish Jew whose incarceration at Colney Hatch asylum roughly coincided with the end of the murders. Described as violently antisocial, the poor East End local has been suggested as a suspect by author and Ripperologist Martin Fido in his book The Crimes, Detection and Death of Jack the Ripper (1987
Fido speculated that Cohen's true identity was Nathan Kaminsky, a bootmaker living in Whitechapel who had been treated at one time for syphilis and who allegedly vanished at the same time that Cohen was admitted. Fido and others believe that police officials confused the name Kaminsky with Kosminski, resulting in the wrong man coming under suspicion (see Aaron Kosminski above). While at the asylum, Cohen exhibited violent, destructive tendencies that would today likely be linked to schizophrenia, and had to be restrained. He died at the asylum in October 1889. In his book The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI criminal profiler John Douglas, has asserted that behavioural clues gathered from the murders as well as linguistic hints from the "From Hell" letter (the only one he considers to be authentic) all point to Cohen, "or someone very much like him."

William Withey Gull

Sir William Withey Gull (31 December, 1816-29 January 1890), physician-in-ordinary to Queen Victoria. He was named as the Ripper as part of the evolution of the widely disputed Royal Conspiracy theory. Thanks to the popularity of this theory among fiction writers and for its dramatic nature, Gull shows up as the Ripper in a number of books and films (including a 1988 TV film Jack the Ripper starring Michael Caine and the graphic novel From Hell written by Alan Moore.This is fairly ubelievable scenario IMHO.

George Hutchinson
George Hutchinson, labourer. On 12 November, 1888, he went to the London police to make a statement claiming that he spent a long amount of time on 9 November, 1888, watching the room that Mary Jane Kelly lived in after he saw her with a man of conspicuous appearance. He gave a very detailed description of a suspect despite the darkness of that night. The accuracy of Hutchinson's statement was later disputed among the senior police of the time. Inspector Frederick Abberline, after interviewing Hutchinson, believed that Hutchinson's account was truthful. However, another police official later claimed that the only witness who got a good look at the killer was Jewish. Hutchinson was not a Jew, and thus not that witness. Some modern scholars have suggested that Hutchinson was the Ripper himself, trying to confuse the police with a false description.

James Kelly
James Kelly (no known relation to the Ripper victim Mary Kelly). Having murdered his wife in 1883 by stabbing her in the neck, he was convicted of the crime. Considered insane, he was transferred to a mental asylum, from which he escaped in early 1888. The police searched for him unsuccessfully during the period of the murders, but he had apparently disappeared with no trace. He unexpectedly turned himself back in to officials in 1927, and died two years later, presumably of natural causes. His whereabouts and activities at the time of the murders remain unknown.

James Maybrick
James Maybrick, (24 October 1838-11 May, 1889) was a Liverpool cotton merchant. His wife Florence who he married in 1881, possibly bigamously, was an American of considerably younger years and related to a wealthy Alabama banking family. She was convicted of poisoning him with arsenic in a trial that was, in its time sensational, primarily because of the extreme bias of the Judge's summing up and the omission of important evidence.

James Maybrick, who was a secretive arsenic eater, this habit being suppressed at the trial probably by his brother Michael Maybrick, was unhappy at the expenses his wife incurred entertaining and maintaining the household. This was causing him financial embarrassment. Additionally his wife was associating in public with another Liverpool cotton broker with whom she spent time in London.

Due to the controversy over the case which was presided over by Justice Stephen (the father of another Ripper suspect James Kenneth Stephen, tutor to the Duke of Clarence and Avondale) her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. This commutation was reluctantly granted by Queen Victoria after petitions and uproar on both sides of the Atlantic. Florence

Murder and violence were commonplace in the East End and South of London in the late 19th Century. Men commonly carried guns or swordsticks for protection.Women from respectable familes seldom ventured out alone - and certainly not to Whitechapel.
Unmarried mothers or abandoned wives had only one recourse - prostitution or starvation.Life coul be very cruel for single women. The press senationalised the Ripper Killing even more than they needed to - it sold newspapers.
Other Murders were possibly the work of Jack the Ripper but may well have been suppressed by the police to avoid frightening ore enraging the populace even more.There is little documentary evidence about these murders.
Here are some of those reported possible victims :

"Fairy Fay," who may not even have existed.Alleged to have been killed at Chistmas in 1887 with "a stake thrust through her abdomen." Fay is possibly an invention of the press with confusing details of
the murder of Emma Elizabeth Smith with a separate non-fatal attack the previous Christmas. There are no records of murders in Whitechapel at or around Christmas 1886 or 1887

Annie Millwood
Agd 48 was attacked on February 25, 1888.THe Hospital report stated she had "numerous stabs in the legs and lower part of the body." She was discharged from hospital but died from apparently natural causes on March 31, 1888.

Ada Wilson
Attcked on on March 28, 1888, resulting in two stabs in the neck. She survived the attack.

Emma Elizabeth Smith
Emma was 45 years old and was attacked in Osborn Street, Whitechapel (near the other Ripper attacks) onApril 3, 1888, and a blunt object was inserted into her vagina, rupturing her perineum. She amazingly survived the attack and walked back to her lodgings with the injuries. Later she told police at the hospital that she was attacked by two or three men, including a teenager. She fell into a coma and died on April 5, 1888.Althoug this was prbably Not a Ripper attack it does show the level of violence that was commonplace then.

Martha Tabram
(AKA Emma Turner) maiden name Martha White)
killed on August 7, 1888 aged 38.Martha is one of the more likely Ripper victims as she had 39 stab wounds - a ferocious attack. She also was attacked in the Rippers hunting ground in George Yard Buildings, George Yard, Whitechapel although he stabbed her rather than his usual slashing savageness.

The Whitehall Mystery
Another mystery this -
a headless torso of a woman was found in the basement of the new Metropolitan Police headquarters being built in Whitehall on October 2, 1888. An arm belonging to the body had previously been discovered floating in the Thames near Pimlico, and one of the legs was subsequently discovered buried near where the torso was found. The other limbs and head were never recovered and the body never identified. Did Jack the Ripper deliver this ? It does match his ruthlessness and has some similarities to his other attacks.

Annie Farmer
She was the victim of an attack on November 21, 1888 aged 40. She survived with only a superficial cut on her throat, apparently caused by a blunt knife. Police suspected that the wound was self-inflicted and did not investigate the case further.

Rose Mylett
( probably Catherine Mylett, but also known as Catherine Millett, Elizabeth "Drunken Lizzie" Davis, "Fair" Alice Downey or simply "Fair Clara")
She died on December 20, 1888 aged only 26. She was reportedly strangled "by a cord drawn tightly round the neck," .Possibly self inflicted. She was found in Clarke's Yard, High Street, Poplar.This is a little beyond the Rippers usual haunts.

Elizabeth Jackson
A prostitute who was a very likely victim of the Ripper .Her various body parts were collected from the River Thames between May 31 and June 25, 1889. She was identified by scars she had had prior to her disappearance .

Alice McKenzie (nicknamed "Clay Pipe" Alice) AKA Alice Bryant, She was killed on July 17, 1889 48 years old. She died reportedly from the "severance of the left carotid artery" but several minor bruises and cuts were found on the body. Her body was found in Castle Alley, Whitechapel.Again a very likely Ripper victim.

The Pinchin Street Murder
This was another murder where the victim was dismembered and found on September 10, 1889. The body was found under a railway arch in Pinchin Street, Whitechapel.
This was similar to "The Whitehall Mystery" (though the hands were not severed).
She was possibly Lydia Hart, a prostitute who had disappeared. "The Whitehall Mystery" and "The Pinchin Street Murder" have often been suggested to be the works of a serial killer, for which the nicknames "Torso Killer" or "Torso Murderer" have been suggested. Was Jack the Ripper and the "Torso Killer" the same person ? or were there TWO serial killers on the loose in Victorian London.
It was certainly in the right area (still a bit seedy today)

Frances Coles
(also known as Frances Coleman, Frances Hawkins and nicknamed "Carrotty Nell")
Killed on February 13, 1891.She was 36 years old.
Her throat was cut (a Ripper speciality) after she had been thrown to the ground under a railway arch, Swallow Gardens, Whitechapel..There were no mutilations to the body. Another very likely Ripper victim.

Carrie Brown
(nicknamed "Shakespeare" reportedly for quoting William Shakespeare's sonnets)
An American Girl she was born in 1835 and killed April 24, 1891, in Manhattan, New York City.
Is this a lead to Francis Tumblety ?
She was strangled with clothing and then mutilated with a knife. Her body was found with a large tear through her groin area and superficial cuts on her legs and back. No organs were removed from the scene, though an ovary was found upon the bed. Whether it was purposely removed or unintentionally dislodged during the mutilation is unknown.

There were in fact many girls murdered in London at that time - some by partners,some by pimps and to be honest not too many people made enquiries.
Victorian London was very two-faced and the knowledge of a violent.sexuallyactive and dissolute underbelly to the Nation's Capital was something most Victorians ignored.
Don't forget that Whitechapel was reknowned as a red light district and a common form of entertaiment to middle and upper class Victorian men was to spend an evening in a music hall (frequented commonly by available girls) and then go on to possibly pick up girls off the streets in Whitechapel for sex .(usually for services that only prostitutes would provide).
This is why the Ripper lurked around Whitechapel - prostitutes there would be expecting well dressed me to avail themselves of their services and would have no hesitation in going with them to dark courtyards,alleyways and railway arches for privacy.

Dear Boss,
I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck. Yours truly
Jack the Ripper

Dont mind me giving the trade name

PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha

To see what is hidden click on your mouse and run the cursor over the hidden text ..

Walter Sickert may have been responsible for some of the murders (see Cornwell's book - But he didn't do ALL of them -because he was in FRANCE at the time !

A mass murderer in the Countryside of France preyed upon shepherdesses - its possible but unlikely that Jack was a travelling salesman.

We should not forget that Victorian England was a very violent place - it was commonplace for men to carry guns,knives and even swordsticks for protection.
Girl like those who were murdered often gathered together and even lodged together for protection.
A number of young females were murdered in fairly gory circumstances in the few years following Tumbltey's flight to the USA and this may well put him in the clear.

A fairly tenuous link to the Royal Family and their surgeon has been put forward but that really does seem a bit far-fetched.
A Freemasonry link is possible to the murderer -after the erasing of the message by the police - perhaps not from the anti-semitic angle but from erasure of a phrase used at those times by Masons.
Most senior Police officers belonged to Masonic Lodges in the late 19th Century.
Again though this seems unlikely and an attempt by some to besmirch otherwise unblemished reputations.

There's a Guided Jack the Ripper Walk which I believe starts at Whitechapel Station.
I suggest you take that rather than a self guided walk as that area is still fairly unpleasant especially at night.
There's a route here :Jack The Ripper Tour
But I really suggest you don't do this walk on your own....

This would explain the anomalies in modus operandi that have puzzled people ever since.
First one was John Druitt Montague who killed himself and was seriously thought to be the Ripper by Detectives at the time (there is probably still some missing evidence about Montague since this was mentioned at the time (maybe down the back of a filing cabinet ?))

"Dr" Francis Tumblety is my other favourite as he was definitely a rogue ,villain and abortionist.
Many (but NOT ALL of the murders ceased after he fled to America - and he was suspected of murder over there too)

My point is not that either or both of these actually WERE The Ripper but either could have been guilty. In circumstances at the time with mass hysteria in the newspapers, it would have been all too easy for some fantasist to realise his fantasies by aping the actual killer - in fact there could well have been several rippers working independently or as a team !
Before you dismiss this theory out of hand just look at the newspapers nowadays - we have more serial killers now than ever existed in Victorian London - and many of these freely confess to doing copycat murders .....