Jack the Ripper - Page 2

The murders were investigated by:

• Detective Inspector Edmund Reid and the local Whitechapel CID,
• After the Nichols murder Scotland Yard was brought in - Detective Inspectors Frederick George Abberline, Henry Moore, and Walter Andrews, together with a team of subordinate officers.
• After the Eddowes murder the City of London Police - Detective Inspector James McWilliam

In spite of all this police manpower committed to the investigation of the Ripper murders, no one was ever arrested and convicted. In fact, it was never determined with any certainty which were murders committed by Jack the Ripper and which by other people.

Suspects
Since 1888/1889, there has been endless speculation about the identity of the Jack the Ripper but, around that time and in the few years following, the police only had four definite suspects.

They were:

• Kosminski, a poor Polish Jew living in Whitechapel
• Montague John Druitt, a 31 year old barrister and school teacher who committed suicide in December 1888
• Michael Ostrog, a Russian thief and confidence trickster, who had been committed to lunatic asylums several times
• Dr Francis J Tumblety who was arrested in November 1988 for acts of gross indecency. He was 56 and an Irish American patent medicine man, who was arrested in November 1888 for offences of gross indecency. After his arrest on the indecency charge, he fled to the USA.

Only the last of these, Tumblety, was a suspect during the investigation. The other three were named in an 1889 report by Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police in the CID at Scotland Yard. In any case, there was no evidence strong enough against any of the suspects for an arrest and trial.

As well as these men who came under suspicion at the time of the investigation or a few years later, over the years many others have been named by journalists and authors. They include Queen Victoria's grandson, Prince Albert Victor, son of Prince Edward, later King. Unfortunately for people who like this theory, it seems there is documentary evidence that he wasn't in London at the time of most of the murders and it wasn't until 1962 he even came under suspicion in a book on the subject.

The artist Walter Sickert is another suspect and the favourite for author, Patricia Cornwell, in her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper - Case Closed. She cites mitochondrial DNA evidence from the 'Ripper letters', evidence from his paintings where murdered women are apparently depicted as well as other evidence, much of it circumstancial and unlikely to convince a jury. There have been detailed and convincing rebuttals of this theory.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll author of Alice in Wonderland, is another famous Victorian who has been named. This time by author Richard Wallace in his 1996 book Jack the Ripper: the Light Hearted Friend. He based his hypothesis on a number of anagrams found in Carroll's books but some of these are very forced and Wallace also has to substitute letters in some cases to make them work. There appears to be no credible evidence against Lewis Carroll.

These are just three of the most well known of possible suspects named in the years since the murders were committed. It must be stressed, however, that none of them came under suspicion during the investigaton.

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