Jack The Ripper

The true identity of one of the most famous of the werewolf-type rippers of the past century and a quarter remains unknown. No one knows for certain whether Jack the Ripper was a man or a woman - a Jane the Ripper. There is even disagreement over how many victims were riped and slashed by the monster;s maniacal blade. What is generally agreed upon in that in 1888, during the black hours before dawn, the Ripper butchered at least five woman in London's East End.

The newspaper gave him his notorious nickname, and it cought on quickly among the Londoners who shudderd behind locked doors on those foggy autumn nights. But there were always those woman who went out at night in spit of the malignant presence of lurking death. The victims were all streetwalkers, but that fact didn't make the jod of catching the Ripper any easier for the london police. Although some historians of crime place the number of deaths attributed to the Ripper as high as 15, there is a consensus that the series of slayings began with the murder of Mary Ann Nichols on the night of August 13, 1888, and ended nine weeks later with the gruesome slaughter of Mary Jeanette Kelly.

Mary Ann Nichols was found laying across a gutter. She had been repeatedly slashed by someone with a long-longhandled knife and a general knowladge of anatomy. A week later, Annie Chapman was found in a backyard, her head nearly severed from her neck. Certain other "horrible mutilations" were hinted at in the papers. The Ripper had taken two brass rings from her pockets and carefully arranged them at her feet.

A few nights later the Ripper was interrupted in his attacked on a local celebrity known as Long Liz by a man who drove a pony cart into the yard. The pony shied at the fleeting figure of Jack, and the driver jumped down from his seat to lift the woman's head. The blood poured from the open wound in her throat, and it was evident that she was not going to survive.

Apparently the intrusion so annoyed the Ripper that within an hour he had lured Catherine Eddows into a lonly ally were he could indulge his perverse and deadly passion at his leisure. After the preliinary slashing of the throat, Jack extracted the left kidney, certain other organs, and wiped his hands and knife clean on her apron.

The London newspaper ran countless stories speculating about the Rippers true identity. Perhaps he was a demonic butcher, a Polish Jew, an American sailor, a Russian doctor, and a host of other suspects - anyone, it seemed, so long as he was not English. Jack, who was obviously following his press quite carefully and enjoying every inch of ink in the papers, counterd with this famous qoatrain which he sent to the Times:

I'm not a butcher; I'm not a yid,
Nor yet a foreign skipper;
But I am your own true loving friend,
Yours truely - Jack The Ripper.

The Ripper corresponded with Scotland Yard as well as the London newspapers in a monstrous yet grimly humorous manner. He once wrote: "Next time i shall clip the lady's ears off and send them to the police, just for jolly." Toa ppersistent police officer, whome investigation was evidently well known to the Ripper, he sent part of a kidney. "Ihave fried and eaten the other part," he stated in an accompanying note.

Jeanette Kelly was the only victim killed indoors, and she was the only lady of the streets who might have been considered quite atractive. She had been seen by someone singing "Sweet Violet" during the evening and she had seemed to be in high spirits. Her horridly mutilated corpse was discoverd the next morrning by a passerby who could look directly into her ground level apartment.

Sir Melville Macnaghten, a Scotland Yard official, Reported that the Ripper must have spent at least two hours over his hellish work: : "A fire was burning low in the room, but nether stove nor gas was there . The madman made a bonfire of some old newspaper and of his victim's clothes, and by this dim irreligious light, a scene was enacted whitch nothing witnessed by Dante, in his visit to the infernal regions, could have surpassed."

Although most of Kelly's internal organs had been scattered about the room, the Ripper had carried away no part of the body. This break in his modus operandi seems to puncture the theory that the murders were committed for the purpose of gathering anatomical specimens.

The only possidle description that we have of Jake the Ripper came from someone who saw Jeanette Kelly in the company of a man who may well have been the monster himself: A man about 35 years old, five feet six inches tall, of a dark complexion, with a dark mustache turned up at the ends."

Abruptly the murders ceased, but theories about the now romanticized Ripper continued to afford morbid pleasures for amateur detectives at the local pubs and painstaking police work for tough-minded Scotland Yard inspectors. Someone with a knolage of surgery always ranked first in the theoretical ;ist of suspects. The second favorite was a midwife who had both familiarity with her victims and a knolage of elementary surgery. A journalist reported the death of a diabolical doctor in Buenos Aires who allegedly made a deathbed confession that he was Jack the Ripper, but his claim was impossible to document.

The notorious Dr. Neill Cream, convicted for poisoning four women shouted, "I am Jack the..." just as the exicutioner pulled the lever on the hangman's platform and droped the doctor to the end of his rope. Eager devotees of the Dr. Cream/Jack solution to the Ripper legend were disappointed when their investigation yielded the results that Cream had been in Joliet Prison in Illinois throughout the period of the East End murders.

More recent theories to Jake's identity have even included HRH, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence, the grandson of Queen Vicrotia. And then there are those who say that Jack the Ripper is still among us - traveling first in one country to rip and to slash, then moving to another. These individuals see him as an evil, restless spirit, condemned to go on killing forever, like a flying Dutchman of Death, a monster that seeks the life blood of woman to rekindle his strength to whield a deadly butcher's blade.