Instant Genius - Identifying Jack the Ripper - David Wilson

Episode Date: September 5, 2018

Five violent murders were committed by a man dubbed ‘Jack the Ripper’ between August and November 1888 in Whitechapel. Criminologist David Wilson and actor Emilia Fox, with the help of the country’s leading criminal investigators, apply the latest scientific techniques to the case in a new BBC Science documentary. We asked Wilson if they identified the killer. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Music just as the artist intended. Visit name, Audio.com to learn more. This wasn't about retelling the story from the perspective of let's unmask a killer. Let's play the game. Let's engage in Cludeau. We've simply used current investigatory techniques and reapplied them to a case which is 130 years old. You're listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team.

We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at sciencefocus.com or look out for us in your app store. Hello and welcome to the Science Focus podcast. I'm Alexander McNamara, online editor at BBC Focus magazine. In 1888 in Whitechapel, London, five women were murdered by a man the press dubbed Jack the Ripper. 130 years later, we're still fascinated by the case. An intriguing and lengthy list of suspects have been proposed, both by the police at the time and by various authors over the intervening years. Determining the identity of the killer is a task that's been taken on by many,

with Jack the Ripper case spawning books, walking tours and even an annual conference. In a new BBC One documentary, criminologist David Wilson and Amelia Fox take a scientific approach to the cold case. They apply modern investigatory techniques to determine who the killer was and why he carried out these horrendous crimes. Here's Helen Glennie, editorial assistants at BBC Focus magazine, talking to David Wilson. So for anyone who doesn't know, can you give us a brief overview of the Jack the Ripper story? Okay, so Jack the Ripper is often wrongly described as the first serial killer. That's incorrect.

He's not the first world serial killer. He's not the first British serial killer. but he has an iconic place in both world and British imagination, because he's really the first serial killer who comes to widespread public attention. And Jack the Ripper is the name given to a killer who was never caught, who is suspected of having murdered at least five women, all of whom were sex workers, in the year 1888 in a specific area of London, known as White Chapel.

And those murders, because we are talking about London, at the time the centre of world media communication, those murders, because they took place in such a concentrated area, and over such a small period of time a few months in 1888 meant that the newspapers in particular became absolutely obsessed about what was happening and who this particular killer might be, that the story took on almost a life of its own to the extent that it not only became an all-consuming interest in the British reading public, but the world won. reading public. And that's why the Jack the Ripper case is so iconic.

That iconic nature of Jack the Ripper made all the more real because, of course, he was never caught. Now, this is over a hundred years ago that this happened. Do you think there are any particular reasons why we're still fascinated with the case now? I think we're still fascinated with the case now because of a number of things. Firstly, Jack the Ripper was never caught, and therefore each generation who comes to this story anew will try and see if there are suspects that might be more likely than other suspects. And of course, it becomes almost a parlor game for some authors to suggest different likely suspects. to be Jack the Ripper.

And that's also an important lesson for us to learn, I think, because actually this shouldn't be reduced to just trying to unmask a killer. This should be also about trying to remember the people whom he killed. At the end of the day, he took at least five women's lives. And it's much more important to me, to the people who made this documentary, to Amelia, whom I worked with on this, to remember the lives of the women who were killed and to try and make sense of why those women were vulnerable

to attack by somebody called a serial killer. So how much do we know about the woman who were killed? It was such a long time ago, and I bet the amount of information that we have on this is limited. What information do we have on those victims? Well, it's interesting that you imagine that the information that we've got, both on the women and on the police investigation, and indeed on the person called Jack the Ripper, is limited.

Because of successive generations' fascination with this case, which was permeated by the initial newspaper reports that were done at the time, we've actually got a tremendous amount of information about Jack the Ripper himself, how he's. he attacked these women. We've got very detailed reports about the injuries that they sustained. We've got very good newspaper accounts of the lives that these women led. It is possible to reconstruct their family histories in some detail from contemporaneous accounts at the time. So actually, ironically, because this is such an iconic case, there's been a tremendous this amount of information collected over the years.

And actually, because there's so much information, that's one of the problems about looking afresh at the case. Because, of course, you have to wade through a great deal of historical material to be able to start finding pieces of information that might be more significant in terms of trying to build up a picture of what occurred in the autumn of 1888. So the documentary that you've been working on, it's a BBC One Science documentary about the case. Can you tell me what the focus is of that documentary in particular?

Yes, this was a documentary which was commissioned by BBC Science. And so what we tried to do within the documentary was bring some science to bear on the various pieces of information that exist about Jack the Ripper and the women that he killed. In other words, we were trying to engage in a genuine cold case way using the information that would be currently available to somebody like myself or to the police, should there be a cold case review of a contemporary murder. And so obviously forensic science has progressed a great deal since the Victorian period. Obviously policing methods have advanced a great deal since the Victorian period. And quite clearly criminology, which was in its infancy in the Victorian era, is now a well-established social scientific academic discipline.

And so what we've tried to do is see if there are contemporary methods. that we could use to try and re-examine the Jack the Ripper case, almost as if it was a current case, a current cold case. And so within the documentary, you're not going to see any of the standard Victorian cliches about Jack the Ripper that we've become used to through film and TV series. You know, there's no mysterious man in a cloak and a top hat carrying a Gladstone bag. There's no foggy London streets that are going to be walked through. We're trying to look at this case using current social scientific and investigatory methods that would be used as if this was a cold case from five or ten years ago.

So what are these modern investigatory methods that you're using? So some of the methods that we use within the documentary would be this is the very first time ever that we've run the Whitechapel docket, the Whitechapel files, through the Holmes computer. Now, let me explain that because there were two pieces of information there which people need to understand. The Jack the Ripper murders are a subset of 11 murders that happened in Whitechapel between 1888 and 1891. And so the subset of murders are attributed to Jack the Ripper, but actually there were other murders of women, some of whom were sex workers at the time, that we might see or not see as, connected to the Jack the Ripper murders. So the first thing that we've tried to do is interpret which of those murders were actually all committed by the same person. And the way that we've done that

is to run the Whitechapel docket through the Holmes computer. Now, the Holmes computer is a misnomer. It's really a filing system that the police use. And home, It's a great name for a filing system because Holmes is an acronym and it stands for the home office large murder inquiry system. And so we've run the 11 murders through the home system to see which of those 11 are actually one could attribute to the same killer. and historically there's only been five attributed to the same killer, but the documentary is going to come up with some very interesting new information that might set people thinking about these crimes in a completely different way. So the first thing that we've done is use Homes,

which was set up by the police in the wake of the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the 1970s, 1980s, and has gone through several iterations. So we've used homes. The next thing that we've done is that we've also used geographic profiling. And geographic profiling would be a way that a criminologist or a psychologist would look at the geographic pattern of where crimes have occurred in the hope of being able to establish where the killer might be based. And so again, we've used geographic profiling. And in the documentary, I and Amelia will work with Dr. Samantha Lundragon, who does geographic profiling for the police today.

We've worked with Samantha Lundragon to see if we can identify where Jack the Ripper might have lived at the time. And then finally, we've used something called an anatomage table. An anatomage table is this incredible piece of scientific kit that allows us to explore injuries on the human body without the need to dissect a dead human being. And so we get to see we've been able to input all the injuries that the so-called Jack the Ripper victims sustained onto the an anatomage table so that we can really see what this killer was trying to do and how what he was trying to do evolved over time. Doesn't that sound interesting? It does.

It sounds very interesting. This is a really serious look at a case which has historically not been treated as seriously as it should have been. Can we just go back to that Holmes computer? Can you explain exactly what that computer's doing? What's it looking at to determine which of these 11 murders were committed by the same person? So, Holmes is an acronym. It stands for the Home Office, large, major inquiry system. And in effect, it is a filing system.

It files the details of every particular piece. of violent crime that's committed. And so people will input, police officers would input, senior investigating officers would input into the filing system specific details about each violent crime that they were required to investigate. So those specific details might be things like a type of weapon that was used, how the victim what the victim did, how the victim was employed, where the victim was killed, where the body of the victim was found, which might be different to where the victim was killed, what sort of wounds the victim sustained.

Any unusual features related to what the killer or the perpetrator might have done to that victim. So, for example, it would be very unusual to have a victim that was decapitated. That sort of information would be filed within the home system. And then over time, if you then just simply keep thinking of homes as a filing system, you can then say to the filing system, are, I wonder which other victims in the past one year, two years, five years have also been decapitated. And then gradually, therefore, you can interpret whether or not seemingly disparate events were in fact connected. You talk about this an edomage kit and being able to look at the different injuries that the victims,

sustained. Is there any DNA evidence that still exists that's useful for you guys that you can get any information from now that I'm sure DNA testing technology has evolved very rapidly over the past, certainly since

1888? There was absolutely no DNA that is of any use whatsoever that survives from the Victorian period. And I know increasingly people, and there have been recently people who claimed that they have clothing

that belonged to some of the women who were murdered, and the hope was that they might be able to extract DNA evidence from that clothing. But there is literally no DNA that can be used in any scientific or robust way that would help us understand who the perpetrator might be. And so we simply have to accept that there are limitations that have been placed on us because this is a Victorian case. And therefore, some of the techniques that we would use today, if this case had only been five years or ten years old, simply aren't available to us. But for example, it was interesting to me to look at this case and realize that there were witness descriptions of the man that we believe was Jack the Ripper. And again, those witness descriptions

don't seem to me to have been previously treated seriously. And those have been helpful in terms of us thinking about who this person might have been. But no, there is no DNA evidence that I would be prepared to say would be robust and reliable. And what about the, the psychology of the killer. Is criminal psychology a field that's still evolving? And as such, can we develop new insights into the mind of this murderer every time we revisit this case? Yes, I think criminal psychology helps us quite a bit.

I would prefer to use the phrase criminology or forensic criminology. But yes, I quite clearly was able to build up a picture of the person who was committing these murders. And I don't think it gives too much a way to say that this clearly was somebody who had a deep-seated hatred of women. This was a misogynist. The way that he attacked these women, the overkill that he used. In other words, he used much more violence than was necessary to kill them. The way that he posed their bodies after death. The way that he did not have any he did not sexually, he did not have any sexual intercourse with these women, the way that he, though nonetheless, targeted with a knife, their genital areas, their breast areas,

suggested quite a great deal about the type of man that we were looking for, or that we would look for today. and I use a phrase within the documentary where I see his trajectory as a killer as being one about progressive peakerism. And a peakerist is somebody who gains sexual satisfaction by stabbing, by looking at the blood that's caused when his victim is stabbed. This is somebody who is ultimately moving from stabbing to, in the end, with the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, the final victim within the sequence that we attribute to Jack the Ripper as somebody who's harvesting organs. This is somebody who, for me, has severe mental health problems. And again, if you think about somebody who might have severe mental health problems, that's actually going to rule out a number of the traditional historic suspects that previous writers about this case have suggested wars, Jack the Ripper.

Now, you said that you in Millie had, you wanted to have a focus on the victims as well and telling the story of the victims. What can you tell us about the victims? How do you cover them in the documentary? They're covered in the documentary in a number of different ways. We interview or Amelia does this particular set of interviews. Amelia talks to a historian, a historian of Victorian London, to build up a picture of what women's lives were like in the 1880s.

And what we're trying to do is build up a picture of them, that transcends them simply being described as sex workers, as prostitutes. We want to try and understand the circumstances in which they came to live their lives, which would often be about being homeless on the streets of Whitechapel late at night early in the morning. We also try to build up a picture of the women by talking to some of their ancestors. And so Amelia will interview some of the descendants of one of the victims whose life was taken by the man we call Jack the Ripper. So we've tried to build up a picture in a number of different ways. And we're trying to get away from simply thinking of these women as sex workers who were addicts who were out on the streets.

With these new scientific techniques that have been developed recently, do you think we're ever going to be able to figure out who Jack the Ripper was? I absolutely do. And I feel very confident, as does Amelia, that we are able to identify as a consequence of using these new techniques. I think we've been able to identify as carefully, as we can with a case that's 130 years old, who Jack the Ripper was and where he lived. We don't underestimate that there are literally hundreds of thousands of theories related to

who Jack the Ripper was. What we've tried to do is show the viewer how we've come to the conclusions we've come to by using the new techniques that we've been able to harness and some incredibly gifted criminal investigators who were willing to work with us on the program and come to some kind of conclusion about who Jack the Ripper was. And I think, I hope that what we'll do is for those people who've got an open mind, we might be able to put some certainty behind this case. I know that there will be people who will not accept our arguments,

but all I can do, all we can do, is show the viewer how we've gone about our work, which has led to what we think and what we've concluded. Fantastic. I can't wait to watch it. Well, I'm looking forward to people's reaction to it. But as I say, Jack the Ripper had become almost a parlor game. Let's identify who Jack the Ripper was. And let's have a cast of characters that we could say. It's almost like Cludeau.

Let's have a cast of characters and suggest it's Prince Albert Victor. Or it's the Victorian painter Walter Sickert. Or it's the Liverpool industrialist James Maybrick or James Maybrick's brother. What we've not tried to do is engage in that parlor game. What we've tried to do instead is build up a picture of the lives of the women that were murdered and use, harness the techniques such as geographic profiling, such as the Homes system, to really say if this was a cold case from five years ago, how would we go about trying to prioritize who the killer might have been? And then take that as far back as 1888.

There are some things that we can't use, particularly forensic science, because there is simply no DNA there that would be useful or robust enough to work with. But, and come to a conclusion based on a kind of rigorous, scientific, robust reconsideration of this case. That was David Wilson talking about using science to identify Jack the Ripper. He's starring in a BBC One documentary about the case, along with actor Amelia Fox. Look out for it on BBC One. Thanks for listening to The Science Focus podcast. The September issue of BBC Focus magazine is on sale now,

and in it we look at the future of food, from how farming is preparing for population growth and climate change, as well as what we'll be eating in 2028. We also delve deep into the minds of psychopaths, uncover crimes using DNA ancestry kits, and ask why people believe conspiracy theories that fly in the face of scientific and. evidence. As always, there is much, much more inside.

Thank you for listening to the Science Focus podcast from the BBC Focus magazine team. We're the UK's best-selling science and technology monthly, available in print and in several digital formats throughout the world. Find out more at ScienceFocus.com or look out for us in your app store. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist vocal, name creates high-end audio systems combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes.

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