11 Twisted Facts About Jack the Ripper and His Unfortunate Victims

Jack the Ripper terrorized the prostitutes of London in the late 1800s. He was blamed for the deaths of at least five women - and possibly as many as 13 - all of whom were found in alleys slashed and mutilated. All of their bodies were found in the Whitechapel area of London, known for its brothels and slums, which is why Jack the Ripper's collective victims were referred to as the Whitechapel murders. The brutal details of these gruesome murders haunt people to this day, particularly since Jack the Ripper was never caught. 

A seven-year-old boy named John Gill was found dead on the street in the Manningham, Bradford area of England in December, 1888. Although Jack the Ripper prowled the streets of London preying on prostitutes - not the rest of the country killing young boys - the fact that Gill's heart and ear were removed, his intestines torn out, and his legs severed, was close enough to make him a possible victim of the Whitechapel murderer. 

The scariest thing about Jack the Ripper is he was never found. There were a few brief descriptions of what he looked like (or might have looked like, based on eyewitness accounts that placed a man in the vicinity of the victims), but no real proof of who he was. However, there were a number of suspects, including a member of the British royal family - Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, the oldest child of King Edward VII. 

Other suspects include Michael Ostrog, a Russian surgeon; Frederick Bailey Deeming, who claimed to be Jack the Ripper while serving jail time for killing his family; and David Cohen, who was released from a lunatic asylum around the time of the first killings. However, there isn't any definitive proof that any of them committed the murders. 

Only five victims are officially attributed to Jack the Ripper. However, there are other murders that occurred before Mary Ann Nichols, and after the body of Mary Jane Kelly was found, investigators believe her murder may have been committed by him. Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles, Martha Tabram, and two still unidentified women whose torsos were found, are just a few of the Ripper's possible victims. All were murdered and mutilated in similar ways as Nichols, Chapman, Stride, Eddowes and Kelly. 

Compared to the other Ripper victims, Elizabeth Stride was lucky. She was found with her throat cut - the left artery was sliced - by a Worker's Club employee on September 30, 1888. Blood was still flowing from the wound, but she couldn't be saved with the scant medical knowledge of the time. She wasn't mutilated or hacked up in any other way, and it appeared that Jack the Ripper was interrupted in the middle of his actions. 

The fourth Ripper victim, Catherine Eddowes, was a 43-year-old prostitute. Her body was found on September 30, 1888 in Mitre Square. Police picked her up earlier that night for public drunkenness, but let her go hours before her body was found. She was found lying on her back, her face mutilated, her abdomen hacked open, and her throat slashed. The killer disemboweled her, throwing her intestines over her right shoulder, and he had removed her heart and left kidney. 

Mary Jane Kelly, also known as Black Mary, was the last of the official victims of Jack the Ripper. She was found on November 9, 1888 in her bed by her landlord. Her body was naked and mutilated. Her breasts were cut off and placed by her feet, her intestines had been removed and draped over her body, and her throat was cut so deeply that her vertebrae were nicked by the blade. On top of all of that, her face was cut up and all of the skin had been removed from the front of her thighs. 

Although two murders took place earlier that could have been done by Jack the Ripper, Mary Ann Nichols is known as the first of his official victims. Her body was found on Buck's Row on August 31, 1888. Her throat had been slashed twice and her abdomen was ripped open from a long, deep knife wound. There are several smaller incisions on her body as well, but none as bad as the main cause of death - exsanguination due to the cuts on her throat. The murder weapon was not found, and there were few other clues. 

In some serial killer cases, it's clear the murderer has some anatomical knowledge. That isn't true of Jack the Ripper. The lead investigator on the case Robert Anderson brought in police surgeon Thomas Bond for an official opinion. Bond linked the first five murders based on the slashing motions. They did, however, say Jack the Ripper probably had experience cutting up animals. They believed that Jack the Ripper had "the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer." 

Annie Chapman died in the early morning of September 8, 1888. She was a local prostitute, who, in a happier past, had been a married mother of three children. Her throat was cut, her intestines removed, and part of her uterus was missing. The medical examiner looked at her puffy face and believed that it was a sign of strangulation, possibly with a cloth or scarf. Jack the Ripper did not usually strangle his victims, but Chapman is one of the exceptions. 

Many letters were sent to local newspapers and police investigators during the Ripper's murderous spree. Three of them were detailed enough to be put into the case file as written by Jack the Ripper himself. Two of them  - the "Dear Boss" letter, received on September 29, 1888, and the "From Hell" letter, received on October 16, 1888 - had remarkable consistencies with the Ripper victims. In the former, the writer claimed to "clip the ladys ears off." It was received three days before Eddowes was found dead with part of her ear removed. The other letter was sent with a bit of a human kidney, which supposedly belonged to Eddowes, as her left kidney was removed by the killer.