Though no one could have suspected it at the time, the savaging of Mary Anne Nicholls was a grisly landmark in the history of crime. Not only was it the first in a string of killings that would send shock waves through out London, and, eventually, the world. But it also signified something even more momentous--the dawn of the modern age of serial sex-murder.
A week after the Nicholls atrocity, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted 47-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house a half mile from the site of the 1st murder. Chapman's head was barely attached to her body--the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spinal column. She had also been disembowelled.
The true identity of the killer would never be known. But several weeks later, the Metropolitan Police received a taunting letter by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known by this grisly nickname--Jack the Ripper.
Two days after police received the Ripper's letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Before he could commit any further atrocities on the vic, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching wagon. Hurrying away, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a 43-year-old prostitute who had just been released from a police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found laying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into a deserted square, where he slit her throat. Then, in the grip of a demonic frenzy, he disfigured her face, split her body from rectum to breastbone, removed her entrails, and carried off her left kidney.
The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. On the evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five-year old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her rooms. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse--disembowelling her, slicing off her nose and breasts, carving the flesh from her legs.
Following this outrage, the Whitechapel horrors came to an abrupt end. The Ripper vanished forever, stepping out of history into the realm of myth.
Since then, armchair detectives have proposed a host of suspects, from a Kosher butcher to an heir apparent to the English throne (see "Ripper Theories").. Most of these "solutions" made for colorful reading, but the Ripper's true identity remains what it has been for a hundred years--a tanalizing, probably insoluble mystery.
Something of interest is known, however. "Saucy Jack" seemed to be educated in anatomy and the pathology of the human body. The abdominal mutilations that were committed on the body of Annie were post-mortem and were described with detail by the doctor who examined the body after death:
