Jack the Ripper is easily one of England's most infamous killers. In 1888, five women were brutally murdered in the Whitechapel district of London. All five had their throats slashed, four had deep cuts to their abdomens, and three had some of their organs removed. Six similar murders occurred between 1888 and 1891. It's unclear exactly how many people fell victim to the infamous serial killer, partially because Jack the Ripper's real identity is still a mystery.
With so much unknown about the Whitechapel killer, it's no surprise that there are a lot of theories about the slayings. Who was Jack the Ripper? Was he connected to the royal family? Was he being protected by someone in the police department? Was he a woman? Read through this list to learn some truly frightening theories about Jack the Ripper - and vote up the ones that scare you the most.
Theories About Jack the Ripper That Will Freak You Out,
Jack the Ripper Committed Murders in America, Too
Three years before the first Jack the Ripper murder in England, a serial killer called the Servant Girl Annihilator killed eight people in Austin, Texas, in the United States. Like the Ripper, the Servant Girl Annihilator has never been identified, and there are many theories about his (or her) identity.
Author Shirley Harrison theorized that the Ripper and the Annihilator were the same man: James Maybrick, a British cotton merchant who made frequent business trips to the United States.
The Murders Were a Cover-Up for a Royal Family Secret
In Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, author Stephen Knight claims that Prince Albert Victor, grandson of Queen Victoria, secretly married and had a child with a prostitute named Annie Elizabeth Crook. He claims the murders were perpetrated by Sir William Gull, an accomplished physician and rumored Freemason, in order to silence everyone who knew about the marriage and child.
Walter Sickert Was the Whitechapel Killer
Patricia Cornwell claims to have found DNA evidence linking Walter Sickert, a painter, to a letter Jack the Ripper sent to Scotland Yard. Of course, Scotland Yard received more than 600 letters claiming to be from the Ripper, but none of them have been definitively linked to the killer. Still, in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed, Cornwell argues that several of Sickert's paintings actually depict crime scenes from the murders.
Jack the Ripper's Diary Was Found in 1992
In 1992, a diary surfaced that was purported to be written by James Maybrick, a cotton merchant from London, who died in 1889 after being poisoned by his wife. The diary contains graphics details of and confessions to the murders and is signed "Jack the Ripper." The diary's authenticity has been called into question numerous times, but no one has been able to prove that it's fake - or that it's real.
H.H. Holmes Did It
After learning he was the great-great-great-grandson of H.H. Holmes, the Chicago serial killer who built an entire hotel that was basically one giant murder trap, Jeff Mudgett was spooked. He learned everything he could about Holmes and started seeing connections between Holmes and the Ripper. Mudgett had Holmes's handwriting compared to the handwriting on one of the Ripper letters (which was never conclusively proven to have come from the killer), and one expert concluded that they were written by the same person.
Four of the Murders Were a Cover-Up for the Fifth
Mary Jane Kelly is widely believed to be the last victim of Jack the Ripper, but one man claims that the four murders that preceded hers were just an elaborate ruse to cover up the reason Kelly she was killed. Dr. Wynne Weston-Davies, author of The Real Mary Kelly, believes that Kelly's husband, Francis Spurzheim Craig, was the infamous serial killer.
His motive? Craig was angry that Kelly had returned to prostitution shortly after they married, so he killed four other prostitutes first to make it seem like there was a pattern. Then, when he killed his wife, the police would have no reason to suspect him - she was just another tragic victim of a madman, not the victim of a deranged husband who went to extraordinary lengths to conceal his crime.
DNA Evidence Has Identified Jack the Ripper
In 2014, new DNA evidence emerged from a shawl that was allegedly found at one of the crime scenes. The shawl was never logged into evidence books because a detective took it home, planning to give it to his wife. She was horrified and put it in a box without washing it. It was passed down through their family before eventually being put up for auction in 2007, when Russell Edwards, an amateur Ripperologist, bought it.
Edwards immediately set about trying to procure DNA samples from the shawl, and through some serious luck, managed to find viable genetic profiles from several people. One of them was Catherine Eddowes, one of the Ripper's victims, and another was Aaron Kosminski, a Polish immigrant who had long been suspected of the crimes. It's not clear why police named him as a suspect, but notes from the original detectives on the case contain his name. He was committed to an insane asylum in 1891 after being diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia.
It Was a Freemason Conspiracy
In his book, They All Love Jack: Busting the Ripper, Bruce Robinson claims that anti-Semitic graffiti was found at one of the crime scenes. Police Commissioner Sir Charles Warren ordered it to be removed and it was never photographed. Robinson believes that this was not an attempt to avoid violence against Jewish people, but instead a cover-up. Because that graffiti told Warren something: the killer was a Freemason, just like him.
See, the graffiti included the word "Juwes," spelled just like that. And no, that's not just an old-timey way of spelling Jews. It refers to three men from a Masonic allegory named Jubela, Jubelo and Jubelum - collectively, the Juwes - who murdered Hiram Abiff. Robinson believes Michael Maybrick, a Freemason and the brother of James Maybrick, another suspect, was Jack the Ripper, and the Masons helped him cover it up.
Lewis Carroll Was the Ripper - And Left Clues in His Writing
It definitely seems likely that Lewis Carroll (born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson), the author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, killed a bunch of women and left clues about it in a children's version of that book, right? No?
Richard Wallace, author of Jack the Ripper, Light-Hearted Friend (a suitably uncomfortable name for this icky theory), seems to think so. He claims that Carroll left hidden messages that detailed his crimes (which he committed with the help of his friend Thomas Vere Bayne) in the form of anagrams in several of his books.
From Casebook, here is one such example. Wallace takes this passage from Dodgson's The Nursery Alice, a children's version of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland:
So she wondered away, through the wood, carrying the ugly little thing with her. And a great job it was to keep hold of it, it wriggled about so. But at last she found out that the proper way was to keep tight hold of itself foot and its right ear.
And turns it into:
She wriggled about so! But at last Dodgson and Bayne found a way to keep hold of the fat little whore. I got a tight hold of her and slit her throat, left ear to right. It was tough, wet, disgusting, too. So weary of it, they threw up - Jack the Ripper.
Jill the Ripper
A witness to the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, one of the Ripper's victims, told a very strange story: she claimed to have seen Kelly at around 8:30 am on Friday, November 8, 1888. The only problem? The coroner concluded that Kelly died around 4 am that day.
The witness insisted that she saw a woman wearing Kelly's clothes hours after she was murdered. Detective Frederick Abberline, one of the lead investigators on the case, wondered if perhaps the killer was a woman who had stolen and worn Kelly's clothing as a disguise. It was posited that if Jack the Ripper were actually Jill the Ripper, she would have to be a midwife because of the surgical precision with which many of the victims' organs were removed. This led to another nickname: "the Mad Midwife."
Some people believe that this mad midwife is Mary Pearcey, who killed her former lover's new wife and their 18-month-old baby. Pearcey slit the woman's throat from ear to ear and dumped her body in the street. The baby had been smothered to death.