Who was JACK THE RIPPER?

Even today, no one knows what the person known as Jack the Ripper really looked like. No one even knows his real name. Nevertheless— or perhaps exactly because of that— this “phantom figure” has continued to captivate the popular imagination. For more than 130 years, the deeds of London’s serial killer, as portrayed in dozens of movies and books, have inspired tremendous horror. But the Ripper also fascinates historians and tourists from around the world: Every day people flock to the Whitechapel district of the East End of London in order to retrace the footsteps of the legendary murderer. But who was actually responsible for making Jack the Ripper such a legend?

For a period of about three months in 1888, a brutal series of murders in Whitechapel kept the population of London in sheer panic. Among the victims were at least seven women, all of them prostitutes, who were killed and mutilated with increasing gruesomeness. Police assumed they had all been murdered by the same person, and the long list of suspects ranged from butchers and midwives to Freemasons—and even Queen Victoria’s grandson Prince Albert Victor. But what convinced the police that there was only a single suspect? There had been a series of “Ripper” letters addressed to the press and the police. In all, 209 missives from authors claiming to be the Ripper have been preserved, but experts today question their validity. During the past 130 years, a number of efforts have been made to compare the handwriting. However no one had used the style-analysis methods that are available to modern linguistics. Now Andrea Nini, a forensic linguist at the University of Manchester, has done just that, in the hope of finding a linguistic fingerprint that’s shared by at least some of the letters.

Three documents attracted Nini’s attention in particular, among them the first Ripper letter that the Central News Agency received, known as the “Dear Boss” letter. In it the killer claimed responsibility for a murder on September 8 and said he (or she) would cut an ear off the next victim and send it to the police. The next victim was missing part of her ear, though the police never received it. The third missive was a postcard signed by “Saucy Jacky.” In it the author claimed to have killed two women on the night of September 30. Another significant text was also addressed to the agency, but the recipient, journalist Tom Bulling, had copied the text of the note and sent only the envelope to the police—a decision that was never explained. Nini focused on the first and third of these Ripper documents, the “Dear Boss” letter and the “Saucy Jacky” postcard. His conclusion: “There is very strong linguistic evidence that these two texts were written by the same person.” Specifically, the two shared the usage of the expression “keep back” meaning “to withhold,” as in the sentence “Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work” in the “Dear Boss” letter. There is evidence that journalist Tom Bulling wrote all three of these texts himself. Scotland Yard believed Bulling to be the author of the “Dear Boss” letter, and the Central News Agency had a distinct reputation for fabricating or distorting the news. Thus Bulling may have created this legend in order to sell newspapers and at the same time inspire many people to fabricate other “Jack the Ripper” letters, which were written and posted to the press and police long after the murders had ceased. The question today is not so much “Who was Jack the Ripper?” but “How many of them were there?”