As far as we know, he only killed five women in London.
Today, you can’t even get more than a day’s press time for that.
Just this year, remember those 2 young guys who beheaded their kid cousins and left them for their mother to find? Or the young squatters who went back to the house in FL they were thrown out of and bludgeoned everyone to death with bats? Got practically no play.
I don’t even know if Gary “Green River” Ridgway raises many eyebrows for long anymore – and he was the most sought-after killer out there, for two decades.
I don’t know whether to despair at how jaded we are, or be glad that maybe it’ll discourage at least a few psychos from seeking the spotlight as weak as it’s become.
Even that isn’t certain. Not all Ripperologists think he killed all five of the ‘canonical’ victims and some think he was responsible for other known murders in London as well.
It is also just possible that liirogue’s classmate was referring to the recent theory that one much-debated Ripper suspect, James Maybrick, committed the series of murders in Austin, Texas, in 1884 and 1885. The huge problem with this is that the only reason anyone ever suspected Maybrick of being ‘Jack the Ripper’ was the ‘Ripper Diary’ and that makes no mention of any American killings. To say nothing of the fact that the ‘Diary’ is a crude fake anyway.
Tumblety is one of the better candidates…but only if he was not still in police custody on 9 November 1888, having been arrested on an unrelated matter two days earlier. If he was still in custody, he could not have murdered Mary Kelly, usually considered the final victim and the one most Ripperologists would be most reluctant to de-attribute to ‘Jack’ himself.
For what it is worth, the entry on ‘Jack the Ripper’ by Richard Davenport-Hines in the new edition of the Dictionary of National Biography suggests that, ‘Tumblety and perhaps [Severin] Klosowski are the most plausible suspects.’
Er, maybe not in America but over here murder by someone unknown to the victim is still very rare. According to Home Office statistics in 2003/4 there were 853 “homicides” (i.e. murder, manslaughter and infanticide) in England and Wales.
Apart from the odd blip like the late, great Dr Harold Shipman, who is credited with killing a whopping some 215 people over 25 years, multiple murderers are just not a British thing.
The last thing I read about this case…someoen was claiming that Jack was really the Duke of Clarence (a nephew of Queen Victoria).
Question for English Dopers: when the Scotland Yard police file was opened on the Ripper case, was anything extraordinary learned? Why do police files in GB remain sealed for 100 years?
No. Many of the files were lost during the Blitz and there are suspicions that some of the juicier items had been stolen by police officers over the years. Not that they probably contained anything extraordinary in the first place. The National Archives website gives details of those files that do survive.
Because they contain personal information about private individuals, some of whom might have had nothing to do with the crime in question.