With the award-winning BBC drama Ripper Street recently returned to our screens, Jessica looks at the real-life story of its lead character, Canterburyborn detective Edmund Reid
physicians because of the manner of the mutilations.
So-called ‘vigilance societies’ formed to try to catch the Ripper, the members of which, according to Reid, “used to black their faces and turn their coats inside out and adopt all sorts of fantastic disguises”.
It was to no avail. Jack the Ripper, who it is thought did not strike again after November 1888, was never caught.
In the 1912 interview, published in Lloyd’s Weekly News, Reid said: “I challenge anyone to produce a tittle of evidence of any kind against anyone. The earth has been raked over and the seas have been swept to find this criminal ‘Jack the Ripper’ – always without success.”
The detective, who did not taste alcohol until he was 36, was not without his own theories, however.
Speaking 25 years after the murders, he said: “My opinion is that the perpetrator of the crimes was a man who was in the habit of using a certain public-house, and of remaining there until closing time. He would leave with one of the women.
“My belief is that he would in some dark corner attack her with the knife and cut her up. Having satisfied his maniacal blood-lust he would go away home – and the next day know nothing about it.”
Ill health forced Reid’s retirement from the police in 1896, aged 49, after 23 years’ service.
He had received commendation on no fewer than 53 occasions.
Throughout his police career his chief recreation had been ballooning, making 23 ascents from the Crystal Palace and the Alexandra Palace, and winning the gold and bronze medals of the Balloon Society of Great