Investigating the Ripper: detection, sources and the press

The Canonical Five

Between 31 August and 9 November 1888, five women were murdered in or around Whitechapel by an unidentified killer. Most historians refer to these as the ‘canonical five’: Mary Ann Nichols (Buck’s Row, 31 August), Annie Chapman (Hanbury Street, 8 September), Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (the ‘double event’ on 30 September) and Mary Jane Kelly (Miller’s Court, 9 November). All five lived in the poorest lodgings around Flower and Dean Street and Dorset Street, and all but Kelly were killed in the street. Most were mutilated in ways that some surgeons thought showed anatomical knowledge, although Elizabeth Stride’s throat was cut without any further mutilation. The case became known internationally because of the way the press reported it, not just because of the murders themselves.

Key Fact

The five canonical Ripper murders ran from 31 August to 9 November 1888. They were investigated jointly by H Division of the Metropolitan Police, Scotland Yard’s CID and the City of London Police — the ‘double event’ of 30 September straddled the Met/City boundary, complicating evidence-sharing.

Detective Methods in 1888

By 1888 detective work in Britain was less than a decade old in its modern form. The CID, founded 1878 after a corruption scandal, was small and Scotland Yard-centred. The investigation was led on the ground by Inspector Frederick Abberline, who knew the East End well, and overseen by the head of CID, Robert Anderson. Their toolkit was limited.

Detectives interviewed witnesses door-to-door across Whitechapel, taking written statements that survive in the H Division case papers. They commissioned police sketches of suspects from witness descriptions and circulated them in the press. They photographed the bodies: Catherine Eddowes was photographed at the City of London mortuary after 30 September 1888, and Mary Jane Kelly’s body was photographed where it lay at 13 Miller’s Court on 9 November 1888, one of the earliest British crime-scene photographs. Photographs of suspects in custody were not yet routine. Police surgeons such as Thomas Bond conducted post-mortems and produced what is now considered an early offender profile, suggesting characteristics of the killer based on the wounds.

What was missing is just as important. There was no fingerprinting in 1888 (introduced by the Met in 1901), no blood-typing (developed in 1900), no central database of suspects, and only a paper record system. Door-to-door interviews in Whitechapel ran into the same problem the lodging houses created elsewhere: residents moved frequently, and witnesses might be untraceable a week later. The investigation depended overwhelmingly on tips, witness statements and luck.

The Goulston Street Graffito

In the early hours of 30 September 1888 — the ‘double event’ — a piece of Catherine Eddowes’ bloodstained apron was found in the entrance to a flat block on Goulston Street, just inside H Division territory. Above it on the wall, in chalk, was the message: ‘The Juwes are the men That Will not be Blamed for nothing.’ It was found by PC Alfred Long of the Metropolitan Police, who copied down the misspelling and the line break; City of London officers recorded slightly different wording.

Sir Charles Warren arrived in person at dawn. The City of London Police wanted to photograph the writing as evidence; Warren ordered it scrubbed off before sunrise. He feared that, if Whitechapel residents read it on their way to work, anti-Jewish riots would break out — the area had a long record of antisemitic violence and the Ripper rumours had already named Jewish migrants as suspects. The decision still divides historians: it may have saved lives, but it destroyed potentially crucial evidence and outraged the City Police, who had not been consulted. It is also a textbook example of how the Met/City boundary turned a single crime scene into a jurisdictional problem.

A common error is to assume Victorian police routinely circulated photographs of suspects. They did not. Photography was used on the victims — Mary Jane Kelly’s body was photographed where it lay in Miller’s Court in November 1888 — and prison authorities were beginning to keep photographic registers of convicted offenders. But circulating a suspect photograph to identify someone before charge was not yet routine procedure in the Met. Detectives still relied on witness descriptions and police sketches.

The Press and the ‘Dear Boss’ Letters

The Whitechapel murders were the first major British crime story to play out in a fully developed mass-circulation press. The Star was a halfpenny evening paper with a circulation of around 300,000 by 1888, and The Pall Mall Gazette under W.T. Stead pioneered sensational social-investigation journalism. Headlines such as ‘Another Horrible Murder’ ran daily; Punch magazine ran satirical cartoons mocking Sir Charles Warren and the Met as bumbling.

On 27 September 1888 the Central News Agency received a letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, addressed ‘Dear Boss’. The name stuck. A second letter and a postcard followed in early October. Police came to suspect, then to conclude, that the ‘Dear Boss letter’ was a journalist’s hoax to drive sales. By then it had named the killer in every paper in the country. A separate parcel arrived on 16 October at the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, addressed to its chairman George Lusk; it contained half a human kidney and a taunting letter signed ‘From Hell’. Whether the ‘From Hell’ letter was genuine remains contested.

The Whitechapel Vigilance Committee

In September 1888, after the Chapman murder, local tradesmen formed the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee under George Lusk, a master builder. The Committee organised civilian patrols of the rookeries at night, hired private detectives and lobbied the Home Office to offer a reward (which Henry Matthews refused to authorise from public funds). It is a good example of late-Victorian civil society stepping in where the state was perceived to have failed. Critics in the press argued the patrols were duplicating police work; defenders argued they were a legitimate response to a force that had lost public trust.

The pressure of the autumn of terror ended Sir Charles Warren’s command of the Met. After a sustained press campaign, Warren resigned on 8 November 1888 — the day before Mary Jane Kelly was murdered in Miller’s Court. No one was ever charged with the canonical five murders, and the case remains officially unsolved.

Sources for the Historian

Whitechapel matters to GCSE History because it requires students to handle real Victorian sources. Local sources include H Division police casebooks and witness statements (Met archive), Whitechapel Union workhouse admission registers, coroners’ reports from inquests on the victims, Booth’s 1889 poverty notebooks and the records of the Vigilance Committee. National sources include newspaper coverage in The Times, The Star, The Daily Telegraph and Punch, the Old Bailey records and Hansard debates on the Home Secretary’s decisions. Each source type has strengths and weaknesses. A coroner’s report is precise on injury but says nothing about public mood; a newspaper cartoon captures public mood but tells you little about what police actually did. Pick the right source for the right enquiry, and weigh content, provenance and contextual knowledge together when judging usefulness.

A frequent error is to judge a source’s usefulness purely on provenance — ‘it’s a sensational newspaper, so it’s biased, so it’s not useful’. A strong answer on source usefulness integrates content, provenance and contextual knowledge. A sensational Punch cartoon is biased — it is an opinion piece — but it is highly useful for an enquiry into public attitudes towards the Met in 1888, precisely because it captures the mood. Provenance shapes how you read a source; it does not, on its own, make the source useless.