It is almost impossible to see everything London has to offer, and that is what makes it one of the best places to visit and book private tours.
Whilst hardly a small city, ranking 14th in the world by metropolitan population, what makes London so special is just how much unique history, culture and art is found around every single corner every day and every night.
The beauty of a city as alive and as historically important as London is that it has a limitless number of stories to tell, with more being written every single day.
However, one of the most popular amongst visitors is also one of its darkest, involving one of the first and most famous serial killers of all time: Jack the Ripper.
People visit museums to read various letters ascribed to him, visit the sites of several murders ascribed to him and explore the history of Whitechapel and the East End of London on a search through cobbled streets to solve a mystery that has eluded people for over a century.
What is so captivating about Jack the Ripper, however? What whipped people into a frenzy in 1888 and what keeps people interested in solving the unsolvable case now?
The Captivation Of Saucy Jacky
The Jack the Ripper murders, named thanks to a letter sent to the police and press which turned out to be fake, were a series of murders ascribed to a single killer.
Whilst a dozen or so murders were linked to Jack the Ripper, only five, known as the “canonical five” to people interested in the case, are linked to the same killer, whilst the rest of the Whitechapel Murders have been largely disregarded as either unrelated or copycat killings.
Part of the reason for the fascination with Jack the Ripper is that they were never solved. Everyone loves a mystery, hence the interest in recent years in true crime content, and an unsolved mystery such as this gives people a chance to solve one of the most famous criminal cases ever.
Given that everyone alive in Whitechapel at the time has been dead for decades, and most forensic evidence is impossible to confirm, there is a wide number of people who have been declared suspects, many of which rely on circumstantial evidence that contradicts other pieces of circumstantial evidence.
The canonical five have very similar injuries and organs removed which led to speculation that the killer was a doctor or at least a butcher skilled with knives, although others have disagreed just as strongly.
Because a killer was never found, and suspects ranged so wildly from well-to-do barristers to local barbers, tailors, con men and inmates at nearby asylums, it is almost impossible to determine a motive or confirm anything other than that at least five people were killed by him.
Another part of it is that whilst Jack the Ripper was not the first serial killer in history, he was the first that received the media attention we associate with serial killers today. He was the first serial killer whose crimes were widely reported as they happened.
As well as this, with compulsory education meaning that more people could read than ever before, Jack the Ripper’s killings were amongst the first to be reported on a weekly or even daily basis, with each murder in Whitechapel, each letter and every trace of speculation capturing the attention of millions.
Because of this, the case itself often blurs the line between reality, fantasy and fiction, and sorting what is even close to real or verifiable from fiction is nearly impossible, especially since much of the reporting played into existing perceptions of Whitechapel.
For example, whilst Jack the Ripper is often described as a killer of prostitutes, one of the canonical five (the final victim, Mary Jane Kelly) has been verified as such, although Elizabeth Stride had resorted to soliciting during times of great poverty.
Because there is so little that can be confirmed about the killings, the imagination often fills in the blanks, and that makes it incredibly compelling to investigate and physically look at in Whitechapel and Spitalfields.
There is always a hope that someone could fill in the blanks, find the connection and line of inquiry that nobody else could, and potentially solve the unsolvable case. If not, they can at
least learn something particularly interesting about a dark time in London’s lengthy history.
The Jack the Ripper tours help to shed some light on the collective fascination with serial killers, especially those who are later given the “Ripper” name.
