The Rest Is History - 628. Jack The Ripper: The Killer Unmasked (Part 5)

Episode Date: December 22, 2025

Who are the prime suspects for the identity of Jack the Ripper? Why did he suddenly halt his hellish killing spree, and never strike again? And, once and for all, who really was Jack the Ripper…? Join Dominic and Tom as they reveal, with shocking melodrama, the true identity of one of the world’s most mysterious serial killers: Jack the Ripper… _______ Hive. Know your power. Visit https://hivehome.com to find out more.  _______ Give The Rest Is History Club this Christmas – a year of bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access, the private chat community hosted on Discord, and an exclusive t-shirt! Just go to https://therestishistory.supportingcast.fm/giftsAnd of course, you can still join for yourself at any time at therestishistory.com or on apple podcasts. _______ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ ⁠https://nordvpn.com/restishistory⁠ It's risk-free with Nord's 30-day money-back guarantee ✅ _______ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editor: Jack Meek Social Producer: Harry Balden Assistant Producer: Aaliyah Akude Producer: Tabby Syrett Senior Producer: Theo Young-Smith Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you want more from the show, join The Rest Is History Club. And with Christmas coming, you can also gift a whole year of access to the history lover in your life. Just head to the rest is history.com and click gifts. This episode is sponsored by Hive. Britain revolutionised the future with the might of industrial power. But now you can transform your own energy future and take control with the power of the power of Hive. Hive makes the most of the sun, with solar panels turning sunlight into greener electricity and enabling you to sell excess back to the grid. And Hive's thermostats make it possible

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Your physician in ordinary to the queen, entrusted with the well-being of the heir to the throne. Only you had reason to believe that these unfortunate, these whores, these traitors, destroyed your life's work. Below the skin of history are London's veins. These symbols, the mitre, the pentacle star, even someone as ignorant and degenerate as you can sense that they course

with energy and meaning, I am that meaning. I am that energy. One day, men will look back and say, I gave birth to the 20th century. Crikey. So that's Johnny Depp and Ian Home in the film From Hell, which was released in 2001. and our thanks to the studio for giving us that authentic audio recording. And From Hell is an adaptation of the comic book by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell. So the first person speaking, played by Johnny Depp, was Inspector Frederick Abiline.

And he is confronting the man he now knows to be Jack the Ripper, who is not a poor labourer from the East End or a Polish Jew or an American cowboy or any of the other theories that were so popular in the newspapers in 1888. The second man speaking there, played by Ian Holm, was a man at the very height of the British establishment, a man who has masterminded a conspiracy to cover up a scandal that would have brought down the monarchy and perhaps the British Empire itself. Tom, you're a fan of that performance there? Do you think that was a good performance? Yeah, it's a huge fan, and particularly of Ian Holmes' black eyeballs, which he has by this point in the film. And he will come to a horribly sticky end. Maybe we shouldn't give away who he's playing.

We shouldn't, but we will reveal in due course. And I think it kind of illustrates the way in which the story of Jack the Ripper is so sensational, so melodramatic that people want a solution that is as sensational and melodramatic as the crimes themselves. The idea that it could just have been some random psycho, and perhaps particularly a random psycho from the same streets as the victims, is not something that people really want to contemplate. They want someone who is spectacular, dramatic, preferably famous. And I guess that that explains, doesn't it, why ever since the Ripper seemingly vanished

into thin air after the murder at Miller's court in November 1888, people persist in coming up with solutions. And, I mean, it has to be acknowledged that decades and decades have gone. Solutions and solutions have been presented, and no one yet has come up with anything that has been accepted as definitive, has it? No, not at all. And I think your point is about the search for meaning, for the solution to have a sort of deeper meaning, actually reminds me of the series we did about the murder of John F. Kennedy.

So remember when we did that, we were saying, you know, for conspiracy theorists, the idea that somebody's so powerful could be shot and killed in an instant by a nobody. And it might not mean anything. There's no conspiracy behind it. It doesn't tell you something about the inner workings of American democracy or capitalism. That's unbelievably frustrating. You know, it feels like you're waiting for the end of a story and the end never comes. And so with The Ripper, people want it, I think. people love the idea that it has a suitable killer to match the melodrama of the moment

and that that killer must tell us something about the anxieties of the age or the or the secret workings of Victorian Britain or whatever. Well, I think it does actually and we'll be revealing our own solutions at the end of this show. I mean, I think it does, but I don't think it's kind of about the operations of high society or anything like that. I'm just going to put that up front. But of course, the other contrast with the JFK assassination is that, I mean, people may dispute that it's Lee Harvey Oswald, but there is clearly a suspect who stands centrally and that I think most people would accept did do it. That's the difference. So to quote Philip Sugden, who we've been referring

to a lot throughout this series, because his book, The Complete History of Jack the Ripper is really the definitive survey of the case. He writes about the quest for the identity of Jack the Ripper and he says just up front, where anything at all bearing upon the killer's identity has come to light, it has proved at best, inconclusive, at worst, downright fraudulent. In this context, those who hunt the Ripper are vaguely reminiscent of the Spanish conquistadores, those foolhardy adventurers of four centuries ago who, driven by shimmering viciousness of El Dorado, cut their way through steaming jungles or toiled across burning deserts to find at their journey's end, not the riches for which their souls longed, but clusters of

dirt villages or desolate plains. It has to be said, Dominic. It doesn't stop him from going through the list of suspects. And it's not going to stop us, is it? No, and I can promise the listeners, you will not get dirt villages or desolate planes. You will get cities of shimmering gold at the end of this podcast. Because we will go through the suspects, won't we? We will discuss them one by one.

We'll treat them, you know, with the respect that their cases deserve. We'll weigh them in the balance. And at the end, we will pronounce a definitive verdict. And I think after this episode, people will say case closed. It's dumb. Would you like to remind people of what it is we're investigating, the salient details of these extraordinary series of cases? So this is what people need to keep in their heads, right, as we go through the suspects.

We're looking for somebody who killed and mutilated about five or six women. We can't be certain in the east end of London in a very short period of time, August, November, 1888. Now, to remind people, all the murder sites are in a very narrow area. they're within a square mile, one square mile of the East End and the city of London. So, as Suckton says in his brilliant book, the assumption surely must be, not least given the way the killer was able to escape and to evade witnesses and whatnot, to get away without being seen, and to move in the night when he killed two people,

to move so quickly between one location, another location, the assumption must be that he is a local man one way or another. Either he lives in the area or he knows the area extremely well. Or he's a specter or a phantom. Right. In other words, if you think, well, he lives in a palace some miles away, you've got a bit of explaining to do. Now, there are multiple witness reports. Let's assume that maybe some of these witness reports are of the wrong person or they're fabricated

or whatever. Even if that's the case, there are still enough of them, I think, to have a rough idea of the kind of man who's been seen talking to some of the victims. A white man, average or below average height, in his late 20s or 30s, most people, not all, but most of them say he's kind of shabby, genteel. So he's, you know, he's not a laborer necessarily. He's not covered in the dirt of his trade, so he's not obviously identifiable. But he's not wearing a top hat and wearing an opera cloak and so on and so forth.

He wears the dark clothes of a working man who perhaps is coming away from or going to a place of work. Yes. He's probably got a moustache. There's a lot of accounts that say he's got a moustache as so many people do. And there are multiple accounts that describe him as wearing either a peaked cap or hat or a deer stalker hat. So, I mean, another salient fact perhaps is the days of the week on which the murders take place. So Polly Nichols is murdered on a Friday. So that's the early hours of a Friday. Annie Chapman, early hours of a Saturday.

Liz Stride and Kate Eddo's early hours of a Sunday. Mary Jane Kelly early hours of a Friday, but that Friday is a bank holiday. And just to throw in Martha Tabram, the first victim, she's murdered on the Tuesday morning after a bank holiday. So all of those murders in some way are, you know, they are at a weekend or kind of adjacent to a bank holiday, which, which again perhaps suggests that this is a person in regular employment. Right, because you can't quit murders if you're at work, right? And not only that, the killer is striking generally between the hours of midnight and 6 o'clock in the morning. That would suggest that the killer is somebody who probably is not married, does not have children,

or at least has some kind of arrangements that will allow him to go out and desert his wife and children overnight. Or has a job that requires him to walk through Whitechapel in the early hours of the morning or come back from a job? So one other thing, the police made multiple inquiries in the lodging houses and DOS houses in the streets surrounding the murder sites. And they didn't find a single man there who seemed to fit the bill. That would suggest that this man either lives with a family, so he could live with his parents, for example, or he lives in his own rented private lodgings. In other words, he's not another person living in the DOS houses because he would have been caught. Let's go to the killings. I think the killings undoubtedly show that the man has some degree of anatomical knowledge.

So cutting out the organs and things and all of that. The cutting out the organs. I'm going to give myself away here. I don't think I would have the capability to cut out somebody's organs. I wouldn't know what I was looking for. I wouldn't know how to do it. He does. So he's familiar with a knife and how to use it and he's familiar with the innards of the human body, or of a body anyway.

And finally, I think we need to consider why the crimes ended when they did. I mean, this is a massive question, isn't it? We were actually talking about this with the team before we started recording. Why does he stop? Because if you've been escalating and beginning more and more of a kick from doing these terrible things, you're not just going to give it up. It's not unknown, is it? So there are examples of the Zodiac Killer. The Zodiac Killer is an example.

There was the so-called Monster of Florence. There are big gaps and hiatuses. But it is very unusual. It's more likely that the killer would stop because he died. He might have taken his own life. He might have emigrated. He might have been imprisoned for some other crime. We just don't know.

And I think all the more so for the fact that if we include Martha Tabram in the list of the people that he murdered, the mutilations are of an escalating ferocity, which implies a kind of gathering frenzy. So that is also something to bear in mind. So, to the suspects, we are going to begin with the ones that we have labeled mad theories. So these are suspects that have been presented as kind of serious suggestions that we nevertheless think basically a lunatic. Go on then. So I'm going to begin with what I think is the single maddest theory of all. And it was proposed on the 24th of November 1888 in an edition of a magazine called The Advertiser by an unnamed antiquarian who, and I

quote, had been consulting an old historical manuscript. And he writes, it seems that there was an old monastery in the 16th century on the spot where Mitre Square is now situated. So Mitre Square is where Catherine Edos was murdered. As was not uncommon in those days, the morality of the monks was not of the highest order. And in addition to many other crimes, one of the fraternity put the finishing touches to his wickedness by murdering a woman whom he had smuggled into the monastery at the foot of the altar. A curse was pronounced on the spot, and it was on the same place where the altar used to stand that the unfortunate woman, Edoz, was murdered. The writer of the story asserted in his letter that there is a plan of the old monastery in the British Museum, which

enables the spot to be accurately identified. So, Catherine Edoz was murdered by a curse that dates back to the Middle Ages. The obvious flaw in this theory is what about the other ones? There's no answer to that, is there? No, there's no answer. I mean, that's just, yeah, that's bonkers. That is bonkers. So I think we can dismiss that one out of hand. So that's those ghost of a monk or whatever, but what about people who weren't ghosts? So there are a lot of famous Victorians who end up being dragged into this story, aren't there? So tell us about some of those. Again, I think it's a kind of guiding assumption that Jack the Ripper is so famous. I mean, one of the most famous people who lived in 19th century Britain, that you want someone whose real life identity was kind of

of a matching celebrity. Right. So these are some of the famous Victorians who have been identified as Jack the Ripper. So William Eweitt Gladstone. Gladstone. Three times prime minister. And the reason that he is fingered is because he was a great man for going out at night and rescuing prostitutes.

That is basically the only reason for suspecting him. Yeah, he rescued prostitutes or he basically just talked to them about the Bible, didn't he? and then he flogged himself, but he didn't flog them or, and also he would, he must surely be one of the single most recognisable men in Britain in the late 1880s as well as he's about 140, isn't he? Unless he's disguised himself beneath a Deer Stalker cap and a dirty working man's coat. I feel like Gladstone is a man who would absolutely give himself away. I mean, he's so recognisable.

So it's obviously not Gladstone. Then there's Lewis Carroll, author of Alison Wonderland and so on, who supposedly, you know, he love a kind of tricksy rhyme and a kind of anagram and things like that. And supposedly in his writings, there are anagrams in which he confesses to the murders. But I think this is very much on the Paul is Dead level of historical inquiry, you know, kind of playing Beatles, tracks backwards to prove Paul McCarty's dead or looking at his writings and just kind of coming up and stuff. I mean, anyone can do that. Yeah. I also don't see him as a man with a close knowledge of the back streets of the East End. Surely Lewis Carroll would massively stand out.

No, because he's in Oxford. He's a very kind of shy, retiring clerical person. It's like Charles Dodgson, like people are going to spot him at Marlough. Yeah. Then WG. Grace, the famous hearsuit cricketer, he's been proposed because he was a doctor. But also the most recognisable man in Britain at that point, because it was beard. And also, and this is going to be a bit of a theme of this episode, he's off playing cricket all the time. So he probably couldn't have done it. Lord Randolph Churchill, the father of Winston Churchill, and he is proposed because he basically went mad with syphilis.

Which is true. Yeah, he did. Syphilis is quite a kind of, it plays quite a role in the theories that we're going to be looking at. The idea that you're driven mad by syphilis and you might have been given it by a prostitute and therefore you have a vendetta against prostitutes and you go out and kill them for that reason. But again, there's no... Again, a very recognisable, well-known man. and also famously well-dressed.

So he would stand out like, I mean, he would stick out like a massive sore thumb in Whitechaple. Talking about people who would stick out like a sore thumb, I think after the kind of the the ghost of the monk, I think the single most improbable person who's been suggested is Joseph Merrick, aka the elephant man, who had a distinctive appearance. I think it's fair to say. He would stand out, I think. But the reason he's been proposed that he was living in the London Hospital. in 1888. So he is on the location. He was a famously kind and gentle man.

Yeah. He's a lovely bloke, right? He's a really, really lovely guy. He's not going to have done it. And then a real wild card, which takes us back to two episodes we've done before, history's greatest eunuchs and the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. And this is Boston Corbett. Oh, the guy who shot John Wilkes Booth. And he had, people may remember, he had castrated himself after being propositioned by a prostitute. He was so upset by this that he'd hacked his testicles off. And then in due course, he gets, you know, after he's killed Booth, he gets confined to an asylum in Kansas. And Dominic, when does he escape from that asylum, do you think? So he escaped in 1888? Oh, my God. Do you know what, Tom? Actually, the more I think about it,

he's as mad as a hatter, literally, because he's been driven mad by the mercury in hats. he's got a history of violence because he has killed somebody he has a history of very unfortunate interactions with ladies of the night he's actually he looks an increasingly plausible suspect yes and you know nobody knows what happens to him once he's left the asylum so it's perfectly plausible yeah he could have crossed the atlantic across the atlantic and ended up in whitechapel however for that there is no evidence so i suspect that none of those people are guilty. But there is one final kind of the most famous, famous person

who has been accused of being Jack the Ripper. And this is the Prince Andrew of the House of Saxe Kerrug, isn't it? So this is Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence and Avondale. Now this is probably the suspect that most listeners not super familiar with the case will be looking forward to hearing about because in the popular imagination, I think it's the one that has kind of become most embedded.

And the reason for that, I guess, it goes back to your point about people crave a very glamorous, well-known and meaningful candidate to sort of justify the excitement of the murders. Do you think also that in this case, it's kind of in a line of dissent from all that stuff we were talking in our previous episode about the kind of the moral panic around upper-class murderers going out into the West End? And there is no one more upper-class than a royal, right? Yeah, I definitely think so. He's the pleasingly populist candidate, isn't he? Because it would be satisfying for a lot of people to think that the royal family are corrupt and evil and all of this sort of stuff. So he's the grandson of Queen Victoria. He's the eldest son of the Prince of Wales, the future Edward the 7th. So he is second in line to the British throne. So he is, you know, he's an important person. He was born in 1864 and the reason that lots of people listening to this will not have heard of him and be thinking, well, why doesn't he? become king, is that he actually died in the great flu pandemic of 1892, so he never succeeded to the throne. He was known as Eddie, although he's Albert Victor, he's called Eddie by his family and friends. He was educated at home, then in the Navy, and then went to Trinity College, Cambridge. He's a sort of lean, foppish-looking man, quite chinless, sort of he has a dissolute

appearance. Yeah, kind of drones club vibe. Very drones club. Yeah, he'd be throwing bread rolls at Bertie Worcester. And he's best known today, apart from the Ripper business, because he was involved, he was caught up in a scandal in the summer of 1889 about a male brothel in Cleveland Street. It was basically a gay brothel. One of the people who was a customer was his father's eckery, Lord Arthur Somerset. And the American newspapers said, not only did this guy Lord Arthur Somerset go, but Prince Eddie was also a customer. Now, the British ones didn't. say he was a customer for obvious reasons. And it's very unclear today whether the American papers were just making this up.

And actually, most recent biographers tend to be a bit skeptical. They say, you know, Prince Eddie was involved with loads of chorus girls. He was a massive ladies man. He did have a very dissolute lifestyle. But this stuff seems to be slightly the result of a moral panic. There obviously sweeps up Oscar Wild at the same time because this is part of the background to the Oscar Wild trial. Anyway, in 1892, Prince Eddie died at 28.

There was a great outpouring of national grief. Gladstone, who you've mentioned, was very upset about. It said he would have been a great asset for a liberal government. But then in the 20th century, when you would think he'd been forgotten, biographers started to say, well, he was a total waste of space and a terrible man. And they would sort of say he was lazy and he was dissolute and he was feeble. And again, it's not clear how much of this is code for them basically, for homophobia, for them saying, oh, he was caught up in this gay scandal

and maybe he was gay and blah, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, in 1970, a doctor called Dr. Thomas Stowell publishes an article in The Criminologist. And he says he's worked out the identity of the Ripper, and he identifies the Ripper purely as S. And he says, oh, S, he was the heir to power and wealth. His grandmother was very much the stern Victorian matriarch. His father, to whose title he was the heir,

was a gay cosmopolitan and did much to improve the status of England internationally. And everybody, of course, said, that's obvious who you mean. You're talking about this one particular family. George the Fifth. Right. Very good. George the Fifth is the least likely person ever to have been, Jack the Ripper. Although, love to stamp. And stamps will be featuring as well. Yes, there is the stamp, isn't there? So, but also, I mean, George the Fifth did have a must. He had a beard, though, didn't he? He was bearded. And also, he had an unusual way of creasing his trousers, which would have been identifiable to witness. is, right? He creased them at the sides. Okay, so the argument about Prince Eddie is that he's

dissolution, he's depraved, he contracted syphilis in the Caribbean. So that syphilis thing again. He's been driven mad because of the syphilis and he started killing prostitutes for revenge. He killed Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddows and at that point the royal family realised what he was up to and they put him in a mental hospital. He escaped. He killed Mary Jane Kelly. They locked him away and he died as a madman raving in a kind of locked chamber at Sandringham in 1892, the flu thing was not correct. So, Dominic, any problems with this theory? Loads of problems.

So first of all, Stowell claimed that he got this information from the secret notes of the prince's doctor, Sir William Gull, a man will be hearing from later. But Dull died in 1890 before the prince, so how could he know how this story would have played out? Well, he could have been a Mason and have had supernatural knowledge of it. Right. Yes, he could, and we should be coming to this. Second point, I think a massive hurdle for the Prince Eddie theory.

the prince does not have a close working knowledge of the alleys of Whitechapel and he would stand out massively he's not a working man he's he's taller than the ripper descriptions he you know he's immediately identifiable his voice would give him away he's got a weak chin hasn't he no one has a weak chin in the east end no no no not in the east end finally i think another insuperable obstacle he has an unbreakable alibi for every murder. So the murder of Polly Nichols, he was in Yorkshire with Viscount Down.

For Annie Chapman, he was at a cavalry barracks in York. You see, he's somebody whose every movement is recorded. He was in Scotland with Queen Victoria for the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Cathenades. I suppose it's plausible, just that Queen Victoria might be lying and covering up for him, but it's highly unlikely. So what then happens is that in the 1970s, obviously this theory is rubbish, but then in the 1970s, it gets a twist. And I'm sorry to say, it gets the twist originally from the BBC.

The BBC made a mad series in 1973 called Jack the Ripper. And it was hosted by the fictional detectives from the then popular series, Zed cars, who sort of were investigating the crimes. And in the final episode, they had an interview week called Joseph Gorman. And Joseph Gorman said, my real name really should be Joseph Sickert, because I'm the son of the artist, Walter Sickert, from the 1890s and 1900s. We'll hear more from him later. And Joseph Gorman said, there is a royal angle, but the true story is more complicated. Now, Tom, you've done a lot of digging on this, so maybe you should take over at this point. Yes. So this ends up being turned into perhaps the single most notorious book ever written about Jack the Ripper. And it was by a journalist called Stephen Knight, who's a very peculiar person. And it's called Jack the Ripper, the final solution. Bad sign. It's a very bad sign. Here is a summary of what Stephen Knight says and presents as being the final solution. So Prince Albert Victor, still very much on the scene. He is taught art by Walter Sickert, who,

is a very, very significant painter, I mean, a properly significant painter. Sikert introduces the prince to one of his models, who is a Catholic working class girl called Annie Crook. And again, like Walter Zicker, Annie Crook did actually exist. She'd been born in 1862, and she died in 1920, and she lived in a sequence of workhouses and then asylums. And in From Hell, she is played by Joanna Page, who people in Britain will have seen Gavin and Stacey. She's Stacey.

And she ends up in a very bad way, shaved and lobotomized in a cell. So very upsetting for Gavin to see Stacey ending up like that, I think. So Prince Albert Victor falls in love with Stacey, secretly marries her in 1885, and they have a daughter. And this is, there's a massive potential here for a concert. institutional crisis, because Annie Crook, as we've said, is Catholic, and under the Act of Settlement of 1701, anyone in the line of succession who marries a Catholic will immediately be excluded from inheriting the throne. And so Stephen Knight's proposition is that the government of Lord Salisbury is thrown into a panic by this and hits the panic button and tries

to hush it up. But there's a huge problem in this cover-up because Annie had a a friend at the wedding. And the name of this friend was Mary Jane Kelly. Oh my God. What a twist. And Mary Jane Kelly was friends with Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman and Elizabeth Stride, although not interestingly Catherine Eddos. And they team up to blackmail Lord Salisbury and the whole British government. And so Lord Salisbury then has no option but to invoke the full powers of the state and specifically to invoke the Freemasons. It's the deep state, isn't it? The Freemasons are running the deep state.

It's the deep state. So we've mentioned that Sir Charles Warren was a Freemason, the head of the Metropolitan Police. According to Stephen Knight, so too was Sir William Gull, who was the chief royal physician. And Sir William Gull goes out in a carriage and he murders them, each of these women, according to Masonic rituals, with the assistance of Sir Robert Anderson, the chief of the CID, who people may remember was always on holiday in Switzerland. So people might think that's potentially a slight issue. And they also, they murder Catherine Edos, and that's a case of mistaken identity.

Oh, yeah. Because she was a jolly person and would never have blackmailed the... She'd never have joined in a blackmail attempt against Lord Salsbury. And this book, kind of like Graham Hancock or Eric von Danikam. It was a huge success, and its impact was completely disproportionate. proportionate to the probability of its claims. And it inspired from Hell, the Alan Moore animated novel, which in turn inspired the Johnny Depp film, with which we opened this. And the sinister figure who is saying that, you know, he's created the 20th century is actually Sir William Gull, played by Ian Holm.

Do you find it plausible, Tom? Okay. So there are a number of problems with this, a number of issues of this. Gull was not a Mason. Lord Salisbury wasn't a Mason. And when Knight went and asked the kind of, you know, the historian of the masons, were they? He said no. And Gull and Knight just ignored him. So we've said that Knight claims that Gull is going around the East End in a carriage, that he kidnaps each of the various women who are blackmailing Lord Salisbury. He dissects them in his carriage and then he throws the bodies out where they're then found. People who've been listening to our episodes will appreciate that this is. is impossible. How do you get a carriage into, you know, all these various courtyards or narrow alleys or whatever? Yeah. I mean, it's just not happening. And I think, as it were, the killer problem is that Sir William Gull had had a very serious stroke in 1887. He was incredibly obese and he was 71. And again, I mean, he's up there with the elephant man.

as I would say the person least likely to have been roaming the East End murdering prostitutes. I think that's a huge problem. And actually, Dominant, he's a very impressive man, isn't he? I mean, he's now probably chiefly remembered as, you know, a suspect for being Jack the Ripper. But actually, he was a very admirable man of science. And he made breakthroughs in Bright's disease and paraplegia and the study of anorexia, a word which incidentally was coined by James I, So people who heard my episode on James I will remember that.

And I think it's a great shame that he's ended up introduced in this way. If you had said to Sir William Gunn, and indeed anybody who knew him, he will be mainly remembered in more than 100 years' time as a suspect in the Jack the Ripper case. I mean, they would just have laughed at you because it would just have seemed so absolutely ludicrous. I think he would have been very upset. I don't think he would have been upset, yeah. But Dominant, you said that Walter Sickett, the artist, that he is. a further suspect, isn't he? So this is the kind of the next twist in this particular riff. Yes. So obviously Sir William Gull is a ridiculous candidate, but the Royal Conspiracy Theory,

or versions of this conspiracy theory will not die. And in the, some versions of the Girl conspiracy theory, the artist, Sickett, is part of the conspiracy. And actually, he's now taken centre stage for some sort of riparologists. So let's look at him. Sikit was born in Germany. He's a brilliant artist. His peak is probably the 1900s and 1910s, and he's a kind of post-impressionist. So he's a key figure in the transition from impressionism to artistic modernism. Now, this is an old theory, relatively old, because Sicket was first proposed in 1959 by a guy called Donald McCormick, who wrote kind of books about spy stories and murder mysteries and stuff like this.

And it's been taken up in recent years, I have to say, with tremendous gusto, by the crime novelist Patricia Cornwell. So she's gone to the lengths of buying 30 sicket paintings, and she's written two books about it. And bizarrely, she's been accused of destroying a sick at painting, hasn't she, as part of her research. But she denies this. I have to say her novels are brilliant. I love them. K. Skarpetta. Yeah, I've never read them.

Does she not share a publisher with you, Tom? She does, but that's incidental. They are tremendous novels. But I do think on this occasion, she is slightly barking up the wrong tree. But anyway, Dominic, tell us about the... Well, let's see. Let's see, right? So, Sickett is born in 1860.

So he is the right age. He's in his late 20s when the... It's 28, when the killings happen. Sikit was fascinated by city culture, by kind of seediness, by prostitution, by musical scenes. He painted lots of pictures of lodging houses and Doss houses. This is not terribly unusual in the late 1880s. I mean, he's very influenced by the French Impressionist, by Edgar Degas, in particular. We know that he was fascinated by murders and mysteries.

So he's very interested in the case that we've done before on this podcast with Zadie Smith, the case of the Titch-born claimant. He was really interested in that. Sikert painted a picture called Jack the Ripper's bedroom in 1996. It was his bedroom of his own lodging house in Sixth Mornington Crescent. And the landlady told him, that she thought the previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper. We don't know on what basis, though.

No, she said he used to go out a lot of nights, and I noticed he went out on the nights of the killings. Of course, if Sicker was the Ripper, he must have concealed a wry smile at that. Then in 1908, he painted a series of pictures called the Camden Town Murder. So the Camden Town murder was the murder of her prostitute called Emily Dimmock,

and she was murdered in her lodginghouse bedroom in, I think, 1908, and the case was very much in the news at the time. And Sickett's pictures, they show, the pictures in this series show a man who's fully dressed sitting on a bed next to a naked woman. Now, some critics think that actually they weren't really pictures of the Camden Town murder. The Sickett was a great self-publicist. He had a brilliant eye for getting people's attention. And that actually he painted the pictures and then came up with the title afterwards to explain them. Anyway, that's a kind of side note.

Patricia Cornwell and her people who believe her theories believe that these paintings actually depict the murders of Catherine Eddows and Mary Jane Kelly, that Sickett arranged characters in the pictures to mimic the murders and that these are his little clues and he is kind of taunting us with his knowledge of his own crimes. Now, the thing is, if you look at the pictures, the pictures are not as graphic and gory as you might expect from my description. They actually, if you Google them, they feel kind of sad and shabby and kind of melancholy. They do not feel to me like the works of a man who eviscerated his victims in a frenzy.

I mean, and if it's Mary Jane Kelly, they certainly don't replicate the horror of her dismemberment. No, not at all. And actually, there's a, I mentioned it a couple of times. There's a brilliant website. I mean, this is the kind of rabbit hole down which you fall and you will never come back up again. called the case book, I think, a Jack the Ripper case book or something. And there's an essay on this website by Garker, Wolf van der Linden, all about Sikert's art and whether it relates to the Ripper.

And he points out that Siket painted prostitutes in Venice in 1903, and he wrote afterwards how much he enjoyed doing it. He loved working with them, these pretty obliging little models who laugh and unembarrassedly be themselves while posing like angels. It is an uninterrupted joy to paint them. And Vandalindon says in his essay, this doesn't sound like a serial killer talking about his victims. This is actually a bloke who's just like, you know, he enjoys their company and is having fun

and he enjoys their hedonistic, uninhibited ways. He's not tortured with self-loathing or loathing of them when he's doing it, right? Now, you mentioned stamps in George V. Patricia Cornwell got some DNA from a stamp licked by Walter Sickers, and she compared it with the DNA in the Ripper Letters. And she said, there's a match here, there's a definite match. actually the match, you know, as much as 10% of the population could have this same DNA. And the letters are hoaxes, almost certainly.

And if the letters are hoaxes, which they probably are, then that doesn't tell you anything. So I think DNA testing is a kind of, it seems like a massive opportunity for riparologists, but there is barely an example of it being used that doesn't come across as mad. Exactly. I think it's a kind of a terrible temptation that should be resisted. There are a couple of other big problems with the Wolter Sickett. thesis. Number one, Walter Sickett lived until 1942. Is it plausible

that he carried out these killings in an escalating frenzy and then just stopped and never did anything like it again? The youthful jeadespé. Yeah, we've all behaved badly in our youth, haven't we, at times? The other thing is, Walter Sickett lived on and off in France during the late 1880s, and his biographer, Matthew Sturgis, says, you know, I'm pretty certain he was in France.

for at least four of these killings, which I think is insuperable. The one thing I will say, however, I noticed that in the studio chat of this podcast, Aaliyah, who is herself German, says, never trust a German. So maybe we should put that into the balance as well. And maybe she's right and sicker is the culprit. But if Aaliyah is German and says never trust a German, you can't trust her. It's the Creight and liar, right? Anyway, on that paradoxical note, I think we should take a break.

We've looked at the mad theories that I don't think anyone really believes, except perhaps from those who propose them. And we will be back after the break to look at some of the suspects who are more credible, perhaps. Throughout time, celebration has meant giving. So the Romans at Saturnalia handed out all kinds of gifts. The three magi handed out gold, frankincense, and Mur, and the Victorians absolutely loved wrapping things up in paper and then tying it up in string. Some of those are lovely gestures, but I wonder if they're a little bit too extravagant for the typical Christmas morning.

So this year, here's my suggestion to our listeners and our viewers, why not give something a little bit more enlightened? Why not give the gift of the rest is history club membership? It's the discerning choice for anybody who prefers a Hannibal to a hamper. It's ad-free listening, you get a weekly bonus episode, you get early access to live shows, and you get exclusive deep dive series. Also, on top of that, this year's special gift edition of Restis History Club membership comes with a sensational exclusive t-shirt. It will make you the envy of all your neighbours and all the cool people in your neighbourhood. If such people exist, will admire you and want to spend more time with you.

So just head to the rest is history.com and click on gifts. That is therestishistory.com and please click on gifts. Hello, I'm Professor Hannah Fry. And I'm Michael Stevens, creator of Vsauce. We thought we would join you for a moment, completely uninvited. We are not going to stay too long. Unless you want us to, of course. We're here to tell you about our brand new show.

The rest is science. Every episode is going to start with something that feels initially, familiar. And then we're going to unpick it and tear it apart until you no longer recognize it at all. Yeah, banana flavor doesn't taste like bananas. Yeah, what is that about? So it is supposed to taste like an old species of banana that was wiped out in a banana apocalypse. And now you will only find it in botanical collections in the gardens of billionaires. Wow. Banana candy is actually the ghost of a long extinct banana. So if you like scratching the surface, thinking a little bit deeper or weirder.

Yes, definitely that too. You can join Michael and I every Tuesday and Thursday wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome back to The Restis History. This is shaping up, as our team have just been discussing, and with great delight, I have to say, and they're really excited to work out that this is shaping up to be one of our longest ever episodes because we are deep into going through the suspects in the case of Jack the Ripper. We have dismissed the Madder suspects. We are now going to look at the more serious suspects and we're going to start with the suspects that were propounded by Inspector

Frederick Abiline. So this is somebody who knew the case better than anybody. He knew Whitechapel. He was regarded by his peers. They compared him with the bank manager. He's the soul of respectability and hard work. And yet he too has some mad theories, Tom. Right? Well, I'm not sure they're mad. He has two good theories. And the first of these theories, he proposes in the wake of the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.

And it's prompted by the fact that he interviews a couple of witnesses who claim to have seen Mary Jane Kelly around 8 o'clock or 9 o'clock in the morning by which. time, it would seem that she is dead. So someone dressed in Mary Jane Kelly's clothes. And so he comes to a brilliant solution. What if the murderer of Mary Jane Kelly was not actually a man, but a woman? And that this woman had then dressed up in Mary Jane Kelly's clothes to make her getaway. And so when the witnesses thought that they had seen Mary Jane Kelly, actually the person they'd seen was her killer. Then, of course, he has to come up with a reason why it would be a woman rather than a man. And listeners will have noted that we have been operating under the assumption throughout this series that the killer is a man. And so the revelation that in fact

it might be a woman is exactly the kind of twist that you would expect in a detective story, isn't it? Yeah. No, no one had thought of it. But actually, when you see it, you think, yeah, actually, yeah, that would kind of work. Because, of course, you know, when the police are busy looking for a male killer, a woman would be able to stalk the streets disemboweling other women without necessarily being noticed in quite the way that a man would.

And what kind of woman would be the likeliest to be able to get away with it? And the answer, of course, as I put to my wife, Sadie, last night when I were talking about this, is a midwife. Sadie is a midwife, and she wasn't very happy with this theory. But just to give Abiline's reasons for proposing it, it would be perfectly natural for a midwife to be out late at night. There's no rhyme or reason as to when babies are being delivered. So perfectly acceptable. midwives are dealing with blood. So again, if her skirts are spattered with blood, I mean, that would be unsurprising. And of course, Dominant, you mentioned that the killer displays anatomical knowledge. Of course, the midwife absolutely has anatomical knowledge. And there's been, you know, in the murders, there's a particular emphasis on the uterus and on the private parts of the victims. So exactly what you might expect from a midwife. And so this theory is called the Jill the Ripper theory.

Aaliyah calls it the Jackie the Ripper theory. Yeah, I mean, I like Jackie the Ripper, but it's recorded in the annals of Ripperology as Jill the Ripper. And you can't disprove it. No, I can't disprove it, but equally, well, it just seems absolutely deranged. Because it doesn't make sense of all the men who were talking to the victims. There's no female candidate. It's very unusual for serial killers. There are female serial killers, but they don't tend to target other women, I don't think.

Right. And what is the motivation? I think the guiding assumption is that there's some degree of sexual motivation, but this is almost unheard of in female serial killers targeting other women. Yes. So let's part that one. It's an interesting theory, but probably implausible. But he then comes up with, later on, he comes up with another theory.

And this is held to be plausible, isn't it? Much more plausible. So Philip Sugden, it's. kind of says unproven on this. Yeah, so this is the first person that some listeners to this may say, this could actually be Jack the Ripper. This is a guy who was known by the name of George Chapman, but that wasn't his real name. It was actually a pole.

He was born Severin Kwasovsky in Nagorno in Poland in 1865, and he became a surgeon's apprentice. He went to Warsaw. He trained in surgery at the Prager Hospital in Warsaw. Sometime in late 1887 or early 1888, Kwasovsky moves to London. and he becomes a barber's assistant in the East End and then he opens his own barber's shop. He marries another Polish woman in 1889. You'll notice I've skipped over the period of the murders.

In 1889, by this time he's calling himself Ludwig Zagovsky. He speaks, we know at this point he speaks a mixture of Polish and Yiddish. He's a medium height, he's got dark hair. He and Lucy emigrate to Jersey City. They have a massive row. He attacks her with a knife. She returns home to London. He follows.

they end up separating. By the middle of the 1890s, Kuzovsky is a barber in Leighton stone, and he calls himself now George Chapman. He's taken an English name. He has a series of lovers, and he pretends to marry each of them. They have a kind of bogus marriage ceremony, because he says, this is how we do things in Poland. He's clearly a very violent and abusive partner. He beats up his so-called wives, and he escalates from that to murdering them. and he murders each of them with a thing called tartar emetic, which is a white powder, it's soluble in water, and if you dissolve it, it produces something called antimony. And if you have a large dose of this, it will make you sick, and so you won't, you know,

you'll vomit it up. But if you have small doses over time, it will kill you. And this is how he kills them. He kills a woman called Mary Spink, then a woman called Bessie Taylor, and then a woman called Maud Marsh. But Morn Marsh's family demanded an investigation. The bodies are exhumed. And Timony preserves the bodies, so he is detected, and he is caught, and he has hanged. And in court, one writer who was watching him said, he seemed a particularly callous murderer.

While most people in court were horrified, he appeared to be amused. And on one occasion, while a sarcastic smile was spreading over his face, he caught sight of me, and he straightened his face and assumed a serious expression. So Chapman, or Kozovsky, is a very unpleasant man. why would he be the ripper? So this is Abiline's theory. Abiline laid out his thoughts in 1903 to a reporter from the Palmaal Gazette. He said, this guy ticks a lot of boxes.

He's single at the time of the killings. At the time of the killings, he is working in his barber's shop in Cable Street nearby. So he's in regular work. In other words, he would strike at holidays and weekends. And he don't forget, he trained as a surgeon's apprentice. He's within walking distance of all the murder sites. He is a white man of medium height in his 20s, a tiny bit younger than some of the descriptions, but it's dark.

He has a moustache, and we have photographs of him wearing a peaked cap. I mean, crucially, he's violent to women, and he's a killer, and he's in the right place at the right time. There are a couple of problems with this. Number one, he's only just arrived in the area, late 1887-88, so how well does he know the area. I guess he's been there for a few months. You might know it quite well. Does he speak good enough English? Remember I said he spoke Polish and Yiddish, a kind of mixture of the two. Does he speak good enough English to be the person who's having conversations with the

women watched by the witnesses? The biggest problem, the massive difference in the modus operandi. So if you're a guy who likes killing women, is it plausible that you will have this spree in 1888, where you eviscerate them and you clearly get your kicks from ever more extreme and horrific hits. Is it plausible that you'll go from that to a decade later, sort of pretending to marry women and poisoning them slowly, where you presumably don't get anything like the same thrill? And to me, that is the biggest problem with this theory, that the difference in the mode of killing is so stark that psychologically I struggle to see how it makes sense, frankly. We're not psychologists, so we couldn't say, but it does seem that there is a real

pointed difference between a death that is invisible and a death that involves the ripping open of a stomach. Right. Now, I can see how you could start as the poisoner and end up as the ripper, but I struggle to see. I mean, maybe I'm not a serial killer, so to go the other way around. Anyway, but Abilene wasn't the only policeman, was he, to come up with a list of plausible suspects? Because there's a guy called Sir Melvin McNaughton, and he has his own list, doesn't he? He does. So this is probably the single most famous document in the entire history of the search for Jack the Ripper.

And it was written in 1894 by this guy, Melville McNaughton, who would go on to become Sir Melville. McNaughton. And he was the assistant commissioner of the Metropolitan Police from 1903 to 1913 and a very, very serious figure. So he was of upper class background, unlike a lot of the police at the time. So he'd gone to Eaton and he was the youngest son of the chairman of the East India Company, interestingly. And Sugden says of him, it was said of him that he owned to only two disappointments in his life. One was that he was turned out of the Eaton 11 before a match with Harrow, so that's another cricket reference. And the other was that he became a detective six months after the Ripper committed suicide and quote unquote never had a go at that fascinating

individual. He is the person who introduces the habit of fingerprinting to British policing, very late one might say, because it's not, I think, until 905. And he's also the person who directs the investigation into the case that sees the arrest of Dr. Crippin. So probably the most famous murderer after Jack the Ripper in British criminal history. So as I say, very serious figure. And when he writes this memorandum in February 1894, he is the assistant chief constable at the Metropolitan Police. And he writes this memorandum on the Ripper to repudic claims in the Sun, the New

paper that a man called Thomas Cutbush was the Ripper. And Cutbush had been arrested in 1891 after an attack on one girl and attempted an attack on another girl. And in the wake of this, he had been consigned to an asylum. And the Metropolitan Police had already investigated the possibility that Cutbush might have been the Ripper and had eliminated him as a suspect. And there are two copies of this memorandum in existence. So the official memorandum that was filed at Scotland Yard and was discovered years later because people had forgotten it existed. And then an earlier draft that was found years after he'd actually written it in his private papers by his daughter, Lady Aber Conway. And the drafts are basically the same. The personal draft has

slightly different wording, has more personal opinions and a few extra details, but essentially they're the same. So McNaughton in this memorandum acknowledges up front that no one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer. Many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on anyone. So I think this refutes the idea that the police knew who had done it and were keeping it secret. I mean, people may think I'm being naive in saying that, but I don't think so. I think that this is basically the opinion of Scotland Yard. And McNaughton then goes on to list three men, and he says any one of whom would have been more likely than Cutbush to have committed this series of murders. And among these suspects is the man who today, I think, ranks overwhelmingly

as top suspect. So, Dominic, who is this man and how plausible do you find him as a suspect? All right. So he's a man called Aaron Cosminsky. Now, McNaughton in his memo says, describes him as follows. A Polish Jew and resident in Whitechapel. This man became insane owing to many years indulgence in solitary vices. He had a great hatred of women, especially the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies. He was removed to a lunatic asylum about March 1889. There were many circumstances connected with this man, which made him a strong suspect. So what do we know about Cosminsky? Cosminsky was, at the time of the murders, he was an unmarried,

Barber from a Polish-Jewish background. And actually, I mentioned riparologists before. There's a riparologist called Robert House, who did loads of research on Kosminsky's background. It's turned up lots of stuff that actually supersedes the description in Philip Sulton's book. So what we now know about Kosminski is he's born in a place called Kwadava in Poland in 1865. He immigrated with his brother to London in the 1880s. probably as a result of the pogroms in the Tsarist Empire.

He lived in Whitechapel. He worked as this barbassist system, but only occasionally. In December 1889, he was in trouble with the police for having an unmuzzled dog. And then from the early 1890s, he's in and out of workhouses and asylums. Mr. Kosminski is very clearly a deeply disturbed man. At a quote, a doctor's report, he declares that he is guided and his movements altogether controlled by an instinct that informs his mind. He says he knows the movements of all mankind. He refuses food from others because he is told to do so

and eats out of the gutter for the same reason. In other words, he's hearing voices that tell him to eat out of the gutter. Now, there are lots of different case notes about this guy, Kosminski from his workhouses and asylums, and the vast majority describe him as a very lazy, apathetic, passive man. One of them and only one mentions violence. incoherent at times excited and violent a few days ago he took up a chair and attempted to strike the charge attendant but then it goes on to say apathetic is a rule and refuses to occupy himself

in any way habits cleanly health fare and there are similar notes on him all the way through 1900s and 1910s then he ends up dying in 1990 so is this guy cosminski the ripper If you go back to what McNaughton said McNaughton said that he had indulged in solitary vices There's absolutely no reason to know whether that's how true that is He had a great hatred of women, especially the prostitute class And strong homicidal tendencies There is absolutely no evidence for that whatsoever

McNaughton there is either misinformed Or he's repeating gossip Or he's just making stuff up He is removed to a lunatic asylum isn't he He is About March 1889 so that would explain why the murder stopped perhaps. The one violent thing we're told is that he picks up a chair and tries to hit the bloke who's coming in to kind of tell him to come for his tea or something. I mean, that doesn't

strike me as the sign of, you know, homicidal tendencies, frankly. He's very short and slight because he only eats food out of the gutter. So the guy who's the ripper who's talking to the women and presumably, you know, going with them, making a deal and going with them into rooms or going with them into courtyards or whatever is not surely an ostentatious madman as Cosminsky is. What is more, there is no reason at all to believe that Cosminsky has any anatomical knowledge or skill.

You know, there's nothing to suggest that. And precisely because he has no history of violence, no record of violence towards women, no record of hating women or anything like that, it is very hard to see that him as the, the Ripper, unless Tom there's DNA evidence to the contrary. And I know you like a bit of DNA evidence in particular, don't you? So in 2014, a writer called Russell Edwards named him as the Ripper and said he'd got hold of Catherine Eddo's shawl. I mean, I have to say, he'd got what

appeared to be Catherine Edith's a shawl. I mean, it's one step up from he'd bought it on eBay or something like that. Because there's no evidence that it was Catherine O'Don's Shaw. No, no preference at all. And also, loads of people who touched the shawl. Anyway, he tested it for DNA and he said, oh, it's clearly the same man. I mean, I've got him, you know. But again, the DNA evidence never solves anything. It only narrows it down to a series of probabilities. And I don't think this, I actually just don't think this guy, Cosminski. There's any reason to believe this guy, Cosminski, is the, is the ripper. The only thing that might give you pause is the fact that he's put in an asylum not long after the murder's end. But apart from that, he

just, to me, he just doesn't fit the bill at all. I mean, the DNA evidence has had quite a striking impact, despite the fact, I mean, so my friend Adam Rutherford wrote about it, and he said that the DNA evidence for Richard the third being Richard the third was, you know, the gold standard. And the proposition that this shawl proved that Kosminski had been the Ripper was absolutely the worst. So I'm prepared to take him, you know, he knows what he's talking about. But I did the experiment before we started this of typing into various AI programs. who is the most likely suspect in the Jack the Ripper case. They all said Cosminsky.

And so it kind of confirms me in my opinion that AI is absolutely capable of spouting absolutely rubbish. But as you say, Dominic, the one thing in his favour is that there's an explanation for why the murder stop, because Cosminsky is put into an asylum early in 1889. And with a second candidate, a guy called Montague John Druitt, there is the same thing that clearly appealed to McNaughton because, well, as we'll see, there's a reason why if Druitt was Jack the Ripper, why he would have stopped after Miller's court. And to be clear, for McNaughton, Druitt is by far the leading candidate, right? Yes. So he writes, the more I think

the matter over, the stronger do these opinions become that he is the likely suspect. And why? Well, I'll read what he has to say about Druid. So Mr. M.J. Druitt, Montague-John drew it, a doctor of about 41 years of age and a fairly good family who disappeared at the time of the Miller's Court murder and whose body was found floating in the Thames on the 31st of December, i.e. seven weeks after the said murder. So that basically is why McNarton thinks that he is such a likely candidate. The body was said to have been in the water for a month or more on it was found a season ticket between Blackheath and London. From private information, I have little doubt, but that his own family suspected this man of being the Whitechapel murderer.

It was alleged that he was sexually insane. Now, Montague Druitt is very much the kind of man who would have been at home in a top hat and an opera cloak. So he went to Winchester. He went to New College, Oxford. Again, the cricket theme, he was an excellent cricketer. He was a member of the MCC. He spent most of the summer of 1888 playing cricket bariously in Dorset and Blackheath.

which is now a part of southeast London. What was he doing in Dorset? He'd been born there, and he worked part-time as a barrister on the Western Circuit in neighbouring Hampshire. And the reason that he was in Blackheath is that outside of the holidays, he was teaching at a boarding school there.

So he's very well off. He's both a barrister and a schoolteacher, and he has an active social life. He seems to be very popular. He seems to have his whole life before him. But then, as McNaughton says in his memorandum, on the 31st of December 1818, 8, his body had been fished out of the Thames and he had clearly committed suicide. And everyone was shocked by this. So the local newspaper in Blackheath commemorated him.

He was well known and much respected in the neighbourhood. He was a barrister of bright talent. He had a promising future before him. And his untimely end is deeply deplored. So what on earth could have driven him to commit suicide? And McNaughton's theory is that he is overcome with grief and despair at the horrors that he inflicted on the body of Mary Jane Kelly and on all the previous victims, and that after the climactic apocalypse of Miller's court, he was so appalled that he threw himself into the Thames. So, to put it in McNaughton's words, the murderer's brain gave away altogether after his awful glut in Miller's court, and he immediately committed suicide. Now, as we've said, we're not psychologists, but I gather that this is not how serial killers operate.

There is apparently no example of a serial killer being so ashamed of a killing spree that he or she then commits suicide. So I think that this is a massive problem for the Montague-Druitt theory, because there isn't really any other evidence aside from that that he might have been the murderer. Just a quick question. If he didn't kill himself because he was the Ripper, do we know or do we have any idea why he would have taken his own life? His mother had been confined to an asylum in July 1888. so I don't know perhaps he's upset about that perhaps depression runs in the family I mean there's no evidence aside from what McNaughton says that he was insane let alone sexually insane nor is there any evidence that anyone has ever found that

Druitt's family suspected him of having been the Ripper beyond what McNaughton says and it's notable that even McNaughton is expressing himself in a kind of quite a havering way so I little doubt but that. I mean, that's, you know, he's not saying he definitely was. On the other hand, he's a cricketer. So that's a definite, that's a very bad sign. No, I don't think so. I don't think that you can be in the MCC and also be a serial killer. I think that's the rule. And also, cricket kind of provides him with an alibi. So on the 1st of September, which is the day after Polly Nichols had been murdered, Druitt is down in Dorset playing cricket. And on the 8th of September, which is the day

of Annie Chapman's murder. He is playing for Blackheath in a match that had begun at 1130. So it's conceivable, I suppose, that he could have left Whitechapel and got across the Thames and brush, you know, had a shave and got out his cricket whites and turned up at the ground by 1130. But I don't think that's really adequate preparation for opening the batting. So I don't think what you drew it was it? Okay, fine. So let's turn to the third person that were Norton names. And this is Michael Ostrog. So to Quote's report, Michael Ostrogg, a mad Russian doctor and a convict and unquestionably a homicidal maniac. This man was said to have been habitually cruel to women and for a long time was known

to have carried about with him surgical knives and other instruments. His antecedents were of the very worst. It's from a poor family. And his whereabouts at the time of the Whitechapel murders could never be satisfactorily accounted. Now, I have to say Michael Ostrogg is an absolutely fascinating and bizarre bloke. I mean, it sounds an old thing to say about a Ripper suspect and also quite a bad man, but he is a tremendous character. So Ostrogg was born in the Russian Empire in the early 1830s and he emigrated at some stage to England, we don't know why. Remember that Mnorton has described him as a mad doctor, cruel to women and a homicidal maniac, and you'll see whether this fits the description that I now make of him.

So he first appears in the records in Oxford in 1863 with a series of strange thefts from the chapel, dining hall and student rooms at Oriel and New College. He's been passing himself off for a German student called Max Grief Gossler, and he's stolen some watches, some purses, a handkerchief and somebody's trousers. Right. So this is his first brush with fame. Then he gets into trouble in Bishop Stortford. He has been posing as Count Sobievsky, a Polish nobleman who's escaped from exile in Siberia. And he goes around Bishop Stortford saying to people, I'm this count. or whatever. And to quote from, I think it's from Philip Suggton's book, at the Cochin Horses, Ostrogg dined on the choicest fare the house could provide

and was given the best spare bed. Better yet, the next morning the landlord told him there was nothing to pay and gave him a hearty shake of the hand, leaving in his palm a piece of gold to help him on the road. He does the same trick at Cambridge. He befriends a student, gets money from him. Then he goes to Tunbridge Wells, and at this point he's posing as the son of the king of Poland. He's promoted himself. He gets the band on the parade at Tumbridgewell's to play the Polish national anthem and goes around telling people about all the wrongs that Poles have suffered and all of this kind of thing. Because at this point, Poland doesn't exist, doesn't it?

He doesn't exist, exactly. He goes to Woolwich Barracks in 1873. There's he somehow gets into the quarters of Captain F.W. Milner and he steals a soap dish, a shaving pot, a toothbrush dish, and some sort of collar studs worth five pounds. But his finest hour comes at Eton. So Eton again, we've had a bit of Eton, haven't we? Monorton went to Eton, right? Yes.

He's got an in for Ostra, Pilfering his old school. Ostroth got into the school and stole a lot of, over a long period of time, over weeks and months, a lot of random things. A silver cup valued at four pounds in the room of Alfred Cook, two silver cups and a coat from the room of John Ellison. One of the school teachers, Mr. Browning, believes his story.

about being a Polish count and actually gives him loads of books, a dictionary of biography, a dictionary of geography, a book of Latin quotations, and a book by Darwin. So by the 1870s, 1880s, the law have caught up with Ostrogg. And he's in and out of prison. And he's sometimes in the newspapers. People will say, this bonkers con man has turned up in our town, stealing silver cups and Spanish dictionaries. But there's no record of any violence or anatomical knowledge or wearing deer stalker caps or any of these kind of things. So the business about him being a mad Russian doctor and a homicidal maniac is just not true. It's just not true at all.

There was only one incidence of him being violent when he resisted arrest at the Fox and Goose in Burton on Trent. But that is the only time he has in any way behaved anything other. He's basically a, is he a bounder? He's probably not quite. He's a kleptomaniac, surely. He's a kleptomaniac. and a massive bounder who's impersonating, yeah, Tabbis has a blighter. I mean, he's walking up and down, but he's sufficiently suave.

You know, he could be played by Peter Bowles or something. He's pretending to be a Polish count and getting able to play the Polish National Anthem. He also wears often clerical garb. Like Calvin Robinson. What he does? Like the self-styled priest Calvin Robinson. So basically, he's a bonkers. person. He ends up being transferred to a lunatic asylum in the 1880s, but a lot of the police

said this is a, he's not a lunatic. Like, he's just a bad bloke. He's just a petty criminal. Is he out of the asylum in the summer of 1888? He is out of the asylum in the summer of 1888 in the autumn. So it could be him. And now he was suspected at the time because the police Gazette issued a notice saying this guy is out. He's, he's meant to be reporting to the police on bail, but he hasn't been. Special attention is called. to this dangerous man. And I think this is because they think he's probably not the Ripper, but he could be because he pretends to have medical knowledge, he has a criminal record, and he has a foreign

background. However, there are some pretty big obstacles. He's almost six feet tall. Now, at a time when, you know, people are shorter, he stands out. But also, there are so many accounts that say the Ripper is probably 5'4, 5, 5, 4, 6. He's too tall. he is far too old. He's in his mid-fifties, and he has absolutely no record of violence or sexual assault.

He's a practiced com man, not a serial killer, and dare I use the expression, the nail in the coffin, in the summer of 1888, a man with the name the Grand Guidon was arrested in France and imprisoned for two years on petty crime and theft. This was an alias that Ostrug had used in France, and it was almost certainly hit. So I think here, McNaughton is indulging himself in, you know, there's a bad, there's obviously the word has gone out to the Old Etonians. This guy Ostrug has made a fool of us. Let's frame him as the Ripper.

So I don't think it's Ostrug, but any, I don't think anyone seriously thinks it's Ostrug. Okay, so those five candidates are the ones that we get from police at the time. And listeners can decide how plausible any of those are. Obviously, there have been lots more since, and we'll just look at some of a couple of the more salient ones. And then there's a particular group of suspects as well that we'll end with. So a recently proposed suspects is a guy called James Maybrick, who was a Liverpool cotton merchant who died in mysterious circumstances in May 1889. So again, that sense, perhaps this might be an explanation for why the murders stop. But he actually is the only suspect for the murder so far who actually ends up murder.

murdered himself? Or was he? Because his wife Florence was accused and then convicted of having poisoned him with arsenic. Although in due course in 1904, the case was re-examined and Florence actually ended up being acquitted. But this is obviously the kind of thing that, you know, Victorians love reading about in the newspapers over toast and marmalade, arsenic, suspects, It's, you know, husbands and wives, all that kind of thing. But there doesn't seem anything particularly in that case to link this Liverpool merchant to the murders down in London in Whitechapel, except perhaps the timing of the death. So people may be wondering, well, how on earth did this guy end up becoming a suspect?

And the answer is that in 1992, a diary emerged, and it's an anonymous diary, in which the guy who is writing in the diary claimed to have committed five murders in Winechapel plus two further ones. And although I've said it's anonymous, the circumstantial evidence makes it clear

that Mabrick is the author or is meant to be thought to be the author. The book in which it's written is authentically Victorian. The ink, it's subjected to scientific tests and it's kind of inconclusive.

In this diary, a reason is given for why Maybrook might be Jack the Ripper and listeners can decide whether they think it's plausible. So in this diary, he's the James Maybrook says that he's seen his wife, Florence, whom he refers to as the bitch or the whore, out with her lover in the Whitechapel district of Liverpool. Of Liverpool? Of Liverpool. And he is so angry and upset about this that he goes. down to the White Chapel in London and murders five prostitutes there. Yeah, that makes sense.

You know, I leave that for readers to decide. That's a bonkers claim. Now, Dominant, you're sounding sceptical. There is a further piece of evidence in 1993, in rather mysterious circumstances, a pocket watch emerged, genuine Victorian pocket watch. And it was inscribed with the words, I am Jack, comma, J. Maybrick, and the initials of the five victims. Oh, come on. That's laughable. That's, that's, that's,

to Jack the Ripper walk around with his name on a pocket watch and the initials of his victims, come on. Well, that's what this pocket watch seems to suggest. Purely, purely because his wife had been carrying on in a district of the same name in a different city. Well, shall we, should we find out how this, how this journal turned up? So when we think the provenance of these important artefacts. Okay, well, it was produced by an unemployed scrap metal dealer in Liverpool who claimed he'd been given it the year before by a mate in a pub. Oh, my God.

So he then subsequently confessed to having faked it. But he did then retract his confession. A further issue with taking this as something that isn't faked is that all the murders in the diary have clearly been lifted from contemporary press reports. They reproduce all kinds of mistakes and fallacies and errors. And what's amazing is that this is even listed still on, you know, you have lists of suspects and James Mabrook still appears on it. But it's so clearly and palpably a fake. And it's interesting because, of course, what it will probably remind people of if the Hitler Diaries fake, And in a sense, there's clearly a yearning for people to be given the innermost thoughts of people who are seen as the images of absolute evil.

And I guess that Jack the Ripper and Hitler in that sense are, you know, much of a muchness. But I think it is clearly a fake. So let me mention one other candidate who was brought up after the events. So he was mentioned by a guy called Detective Chief Inspector John Littlechild in a letter to a journalist in 1913. And this is Francis Tumblety. Now, Francis Tumblety, a bit like Ostrug, is a very colourful and shady character. He was probably born in Ireland around 1833. Then his parents moved to Rochester, New York. So he's an Irish-American. As a boy, he's got a very bad reputation. He's clearly a bad sort. He gets into trouble for selling obscene books.

And then according to American newspaper profiles decades later, he then worked for a doctor. who carried on, I quote, a medical business of a disreputable kind. So I'm guessing probably an abortionist. He spends the next few decades as a kind of quack doctor and abortionist across North America, including Canada. So he sells, he's a little bit like Dr. Crippin. He sells kind of mad products that any sane person would surely recognize as ludicrous. So Dr. Morse's Indian root pills or tumbled his pimple destroyer. for example. He goes around, we're in that kind of 1860s, 1870s. He claims to be a former surgeon in the Union Army in the American Civil War. He's arrested for parading in military uniform

and fake medals. At one point, he's actually arrested in connection with the assassination of Abraham Lincoln. So because he's just such a shady and mad character, and his life is so baroque that I can't possibly summarize it here, if you look at him online, if you look at, for example, his Wikipedia page, you'll see a photograph of him, which gives you a sense of the flavour of the man. He's wearing a kind of Ruritanian military uniform. He's wearing a spiked Prussian helmet. And he has probably the maddest moustache you'll see on, even by rest of history standards. It's a moustache that is, you know, it's far wider than his head. It's probably twice the width of his own head. A moustache that would have been noticed on

the streets of Whitechapel. Undoubtedly would have been noticed. However, there are a couple of things that stand out. There's one account of Tumblety by an American journalist Charles Dunham who knew him. And Tumblety said to this guy, I love collecting anatomical organs. And he boasted of having the uteruses of a dozen women in jars. So he collected these things in jars, which is all of its weird and sinister. And he told Dunham that he hated women. He saw them was sinful. He loathed them. The problem with this is that Dunham himself made stuff up. He was As a journalist, he got into trouble for making things up. He had 12 different identities, which is a bit weird.

And we can't really trust him completely. One other detail, Tumblety was almost certainly gay. We know this because in November 1888, because he would travel between America and Britain, in November 1888, the Met arrested him for indecency, and on the 16th of November, he appeared before the Marlborough Street magistrates and was told he was going to have to appear at the old Bailey. But he broke his bail. He fled to France under a false name. And the American press started reporting that the Met suspected him of being Jack the Ripper. He ended up back in New York. There was talk of him being extradited, but the Metropolitan Pizzily Police did not

pursue it. And he died of a heart attack in 1903. So the argument for being the Ripper is as follows. He's a bad man. He's a doctor. Or a quack doctor, anyway. It's possible that he hates women. He probably collects people's organs in jars, which is frankly weird. The argument against he's a bit too tall. He's five foot ten. He's visited Europe and Britain many times, but there's no evidence that is especially familiar with the East End. As you pointed out, Tom, his enormous moustache. Have you seen his moustache online? I have. It's bonkers. He's got a truly massive moustache, especially if he's got that and he's wearing his prussia. and spiked helmets. He's very, very good. Blending in for the elephant man and WG. Grace.

He's a bad man, but there's no evidence that he's a madman, a violent man or a murderer, and there is an issue with his sexuality. There are gay serial killers, but they tend to target men, young men. They almost never target women. So it's a struggle. There's a stretch to think that Tumble tea, I think, is the Ripper. Okay, so that's him. eliminated as well. So there's just one final collection of suspects, all of whom have been kind of proposed, I think in kind of recent years. And these are people who either knew or met the murder victims, because it is usually the case, I gather, in investigations into murder, that it turns out to be someone who knew the victim. So Joseph Barnett, Mary Jane Kelly's

common law husband, he's been named as a suspect. George Hutchinson, the guy who, met with supposedly the bloke in the Astrakhan coat. Yeah, but he was making that up, surely. Yeah, so Charles Lechmere, who people may have forgotten him, but he is the guy who first came across Polly Nichols' body and was then joined by another person going to work, and they went off and found the policeman and said, oh, there's a body down there. And the possibility of him being the Ripper was first suggested in the year 2000.

by a riparologist. And then it was a subject of a Channel 5 documentary in 2014. And the circumstantial evidence for that is that. At the inquest, Charles Lechimir gave his name as being Charles Cross. So a different name. Was he perhaps trying to disguise his name? The reason why he would have done that is that his mother had remarried when he was a child to a policeman called Thomas Cross. So presumably, you know, he was known both as Cross and Lechmere.

But, you know, I mean, it's a possibility. You could see how, if he was the murderer, one way that he might get rounded, if he was surprised was to say, oh, look, I've just found a body. And it is striking as well that his route to work from Bethnal Green to Covent Garden would have taken him along Hanbury Street, because Hanbury Street leads into the area where Polly Nichols was found, and Hanbury Street is where Annie Chapman is murdered. So it's a possibility, and I think it is interesting that that brings us back to something that we've been mentioning throughout this series, the fact that in Whitechapel, in this period,

it is taken for granted that people will be going to work or coming back from work throughout the night. And I think that that is a salient fact that does deserve to be born in mind. Yeah. All right. So Tom, I think at the time has come before Tabby and Alia lose the will to live for us to pronounce. So of the suspects we have mentioned, which do you think is the most plausible? Well, I actually think Charles Lechmere.

Do you? Yeah. But, I mean, do you have absolutely no evidence? We have positive evidence for basically all the others that they couldn't have done it. Yeah. So going through it all, I think Cosminsky, he's not a violent man. Montague drew it. He surely doesn't know the East End, right?

And he's playing cricket. I mean, the cricket thing is a bad sign, but I'm prepared to overlook that in this case. Ostrogg, no history of violence at all. Who else who we've got? Jill the Ripper, improbable. Yeah. And George Chapman, or Kwasovsky is he's just another opportunity for me to say a Polish surname. George Chapman, I just don't believe you go from ripping to poisoning.

I just don't buy that. So actually, of them all, I like Tumblety the best. He collects organs and jars. He's a bad egg. He wears Prussian helmets unnecessarily. You see, all of them are kind of, they're melodramatic. Yeah, of course. I don't think it was Charles Tumblety, but, oh, Francis Tundon.

Humblety, by the way. I think it's much like to be someone completely anonymous. Of course. Someone in the East End. And I think that someone like Charles Lechmere or, you know, any of these people who say that they've come across the body or something. I think they are likely. I mean, I don't think it's Charles Lechmere because shall I say now say who I think is the likeliest. Go on. So this relates to where Polly Nichols is found. So people may remember. I said that she's found. by what is now the entrance to a development of the Whitechapel tube station. And the Whitechapel tube station opened in 1876, the East London Railway, and then it was expanded in 1984, when the district railway, now the district line was built, and then the Elizabeth line was built recently. And the Elizabeth line was built over the most notorious Nacca's Yard in the East End.

and this was called Barber's Horse Slaughterhouse and it was on Winthrop Street and Winthrop Street ran parallel to Bucks Row where Polly Nichols was found. So this Knackers yard is between Bucks Row and the railway line and the Underground Station. And it is one of a number of yards that is owned by London's largest purveyor of knackering

So that's the slaughtering of horses. And every day, huge numbers of horses have to be hacked to pieces. And in 1879, a vet noted that one Nacca man told him that he had cut up about 2,000 horses annually. So there's a lot of dismemberment. As a Nacca man, you have to know your way around the body of a horse. And you would become very, very adept at dismembering the bodies of horses. But it's not just about the dismembering of corpse. is because essentially there is no part of a horse that a Nacca's yard doesn't make use of.

So you boil the bones down. This draws out the fat, which you can then use as axle grease or to oil harnesses. You can use it actually to oil cricket bats. Until you drew it. Yeah. And then the bones are used to make, I don't know, cutlery or carriage interiors or whatever. And the hooves are used to make glue. And the stench of this is so vile that they can only be boiled during the night.

And therefore, because of this, people working in knackers yards have to work around the clock. And so there are shifts and slaughtermen are, you know, a matter of course, you will see them walking through the streets at night, either arriving for a shift or leaving a shift. And we know that there were three slaughtermen who were working at Barber's Horse Slaughterhouse on the night that Polly Nichols body was there. Because we have their names because they went to view her corpse. And these are James Mumford, Henry Tompkins and Charles Breton. And they gave the details of their kind of movements that night at the inquest. And they said that they started work between 8 and 9 p.m. so the previous evening, so that's the Thursday.

They'd finished it at 4.20 a.m. on the Friday morning. So that's around the time that Polly's body is found. And also at midnight, they said that they'd left the slaughterhouse and they'd returned around 1 a.m. and they didn't leave again until they heard about the murder. So what that suggests is that precisely the time when Polly is murdered, a slaughterman, someone who would be absolutely adept at cutting, up a carcass would have been leaving, you know, the yard that is right next to the murder site. If he lives eastwards, he would have gone down Hanbury Street. That would have been

the route he would have taken. Annie Chapman is the next murder victim. So I think that is entirely possible that someone who is working in that knacker's yard. I mean, there's a reason why he'd be carrying knives. There's a reason why he might have blood. He wouldn't be walking around with his butcher's apron on, but he would, you know, he'd, he'd have a heavy coat on, and that might correspond to the coat that is seen by, by witnesses. And just to say, again, I have no real knowledge of the psychology of serial killers, but two points that is kind of folk wisdom. One is that people in childhood or in their youth display an interest in the torturing of animals, they often go on to become serial killers. And I could imagine,

a case in which, you know, you're a child. The thought of dismembering an animal excites you in some way. And so you find a job in a slaughterhouse. I mean, it would be an obvious career for someone growing up in the East End. So why not? And then perhaps you reach the stage where you think, well, what would it be like to dismember a woman? And the process of murder, as we said, escalates. And the other thing, it comes from a 2009 study by a criminologist called Amy Fitzgerald.

and she noted that people who work in slaughterhouses relative to workers in other interests have a disproportionate number of arrests for violent crimes and sexual offences. Really? That's an interesting fact. So, you know, I can't give a name. But if I had to name someone I, you know, if I was Inspector Abilene, I would have, I think, interrogated. the workers in that knacker's yard quite intensively. So that's disappointingly similar to my own view. I don't think it was any of the people we've named, just to be clear.

I think it's somebody who will never be known. And to remind people, I think it's somebody who lives in the East End. I think merely being there for a few months is not enough. I think you need to know it. You need to feel confident within that world. I think it is a man in his late between, let's say, 28 and 35 or 40 maybe. I think he definitely has a moustache.

I think he definitely wears a Deer Stalker hat or a cap of some kind. We've mentioned many times Markets, and I think he's a butcher. I don't think he's a doctor or indeed or even a medical student. I think such people would probably stand out. They're too genteel in that world. I don't think this person comes across as mad because there are too many descriptions of them talking, sometimes joking or whatever, with the women before they're killed. So in other words, I think he's perfectly capable of presenting himself as a sane

person. And maybe even charming, who knows? Yeah, otherwise, I think would they go with, would they really go with him? You're going to go with somebody who you think is a kind of, at a time when there's a panic about serial killers? Are you really going to go into a yard with the guy you suspect of being a madman? So I think he's a, I think, I did think about a somebody who worked in a slaughterhouse or I thought about a butcher, somebody who's used to wielding a knife and has a degree of anatomical knowledge. But don't forget the doctors were divided about just how precise that knowledge was. So therefore I think probably not a doctor. I don't think he's carrying a black surgeon's bag. I think so much of that is rooted in the political

climate of the late 1880s, which actually we're the heirs to, this kind of popular sense that it must be somebody from the elite, and it's exposing the deep state and all that kind of thing. And I think that's rubbish. I think, and I think what happened to him, what neither of us had been able to address, of course, is the question of why the murders stop. I think he's perhaps arrested for some other violent crime and was put away. But I think he would then have been noted perhaps by, I mean, I think they would have been looking for people like that. And there is one other thing. I mentioned that Prince Eddie died in the great flu pandemic. That flu pandemic had begun before Prince Eddie died.

So I think it's perfectly possible this is somebody who is killed in what is a colossal pandemic. And the death goes unnoticed and that is the end of Jack the Ripper. And that's why the mystery endures. Yeah, that's a brilliant, brilliant theory. Well, that's it then. We've solved it. Yeah. So the mystery is solved.

No one ever needs to discuss Chat the Ripper again. And this will come as a great blessing to our long-suffering producers who have now recorded with Theo away, they have presided over the most self-indulgent recording the history of the podcast. I think this is officially the longest ever. So it's not only our producers who are long suffering, so too are our listeners. And if you have made it this far, thank you very much. We will be burying Jack the Ripper and his victims there and we will not be returning to exhume them for a while. For a while? That sounds ominous. Well, never say never. Never say never. But thanks so much for listening.

Happy Christmas. Yeah. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.