628. Jack The Ripper: The Killer Unmasked (Part 5)

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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Tom Holland?

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• 0:17Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 0:27Tom Holland?

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• 0:36Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 0:52Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 1:00Tom Holland?

  In the long history of power, Hive helps you finally know yours. Head to hivehome.com to find out more. Subject to survey and suitability. Hive app compatible with selected technology. Paid for surplus requires S E G tariff.

• 1:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by the Gates Foundation. We have touched on the fall of the Roman Empire a few times on this show, haven't we? But what our listeners may not know is that among the causes that historians talk about, it's not just barbarian invasions. There's also talk of a disease which people call Roman fever, which I believe we know now as malaria.

• 1:43Tom Holland?

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• 1:59Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 2:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by TikTok. We obviously love history here. It's always a treat to make a new discovery, especially in unexpected ways.

• 2:33Tom Holland?

  Which is exactly what happens on TikTok. Like, you know coffee? You make it, add milk, drink it. Nothing more. Except...

• 2:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  Except, when you hop on TikTok, you don't just learn how to make an authentic cappuccino. You can also discover videos about how in the 1700s, people would pour their coffee into saucers to let it cool before drinking it.

• 2:59Tom Holland?

  And suddenly, you're imagining how people lived, drank, socialised. Makes you wonder what will baffle historians about us? And that's the joy of TikTok. You look for one thing and find yourself somewhere completely different.

• 3:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your next discovery is waiting on TikTok.

• 3:18Tom Holland?

  Visit tiktok.com/discovermore.

• 3:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Your physician in ordinary to the Queen, entrusted with the wellbeing of the heir to the throne. Only you had reason to believe that these unfortunates, these whores, these traitors, destroyed your life's work.

• 3:49Tom Holland?

  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.

• 4:23Tom Holland?

  One day, men will look back and say, I gave birth to the 20th century.

• 4:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Crikey. So that's Johnny Depp and Ian Holm 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 Abeline. 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

• 5:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  cover up a scandal that would have brought down the monarchy and perhaps the British Empire itself. Tom, you a fan of that performance there? Do you think that was a good performance?

• 5:30Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's a huge fan, and particularly of Ian Holm's black eyeballs, which he has by this point in the film. And he will come to a horribly sticky end.

• 5:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Maybe we shouldn't give away who he's playing.

• 5:44Tom Holland?

  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

• 6:29Tom Holland?

  Millers 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?

• 6:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, not at all. And I think your point 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 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

• 7:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 secret workings of Victorian Britain or whatever.

• 7:48Tom Holland?

  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,

• 8:33Tom Holland?

  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 visions of a 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.

• 9:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 9:03Tom Holland?

  Doesn't stop him from going through the list of suspects and it's not going to stop us, is it?

• 9:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, and I can promise the listeners, you will not get dirt villages or desolate plains. 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 done.

• 9:32Tom Holland?

  Would you like to remind people of what it is we are investigating? The salient details of these extraordinary series of cases.

• 9:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, eighteen eighty-eight. 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.

• 10:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 10:30Tom Holland?

  Or he's a spectre or a phantom.

• 10:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. In other words, if you think, well, he lives in a palace some miles away. You know, 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 twenties or thirties. Most people, not all, but most of them say he's kind of shabby genteel. So he's. You know, he's not a labourer necessarily.

• 11:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 11:24Tom Holland?

  He wears the dark clothes of a working man who perhaps is coming away from or going to a place of work.

• 11:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 deerstalker hat.

• 11:44Tom Holland?

  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.

• 11:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 11:54Tom Holland?

  So that's the early hours of a Friday. Annie Chapman, early hours of a Saturday. Liz Stride and Kate Eddose, 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 again perhaps suggests that this is a person in regular employment.

• 12:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 six 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 would allow him to go out and desert his wife and children overnight.

• 12:50Tom Holland?

  Or has a job that requires him to walk through Whitechapel in the early hours of the morning or come back from a job.

• 12:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  So one other thing, the police made multiple inquiries in the lodging houses and Doss 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 Doss 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.

• 13:30Tom Holland?

  So cutting out the organs and things and all of that.

• 13:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 14:05Tom Holland?

  It's not unknown, is it? So there are examples of the Zodiac Killer.

• 14:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  The Zodiac Killer is an example. There was, there was the so-called Monster of Florence. There are big gaps and hiatuses. But it is, 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.

• 14:31Tom Holland?

  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 are lunatic.

• 15:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Go on then.

• 15:04Tom Holland?

  So I'm going to begin with them, 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 Eddowes 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

• 15:47Tom Holland?

  on the spot, and it was on the same place where the altar used to stand that the unfortunate woman Eddowes 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 Eddowes 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?

• 16:15Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, there's no answer. I mean, that's, that's just, yeah, that's bonkers. That is bonkers.

• 16:19Tom Holland?

  So I think we can dismiss that one out of hand.

• 16:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  So that's those ghosts 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.

• 16:29Tom Holland?

  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.

• 16:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right.

• 16:43Tom Holland?

  So these are some of the famous Victorians who have been identified as Jack the Ripper. So William Ewatt Gladstone.

• 16:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  Gladstone.

• 16:53Tom Holland?

  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.

• 17:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  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's 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?

• 17:23Tom Holland?

  Unless he's disguised himself beneath a deerstalker cap and a- A dirty working man's coat.

• 17:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 17:34Tom Holland?

  Then there's Lewis Carroll, author of Alice in Wonderland and so on, who supposedly, you know, he loved 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 McCartney's dead or looking at his writings and just kind of coming up with stuff. I mean, anyone can do that.

• 18:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. I also don't see him as a man with a close knowledge of the backstreets of the East End. Surely Lewis Carroll would massively stand out.

• 18:11Tom Holland?

  No, because he's in Oxford. He's a very kind of shy, retiring clerical person.

• 18:14Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's like Charles Dodgson, like he's, people are going to spot him a mile off.

• 18:18Tom Holland?

  Yeah. Then W G Grace, the famous hair suit cricketer, he's been proposed because he was a doctor.

• 18:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  But also the most recognisable man in Britain at that point, because of his beard.

• 18:29Tom Holland?

  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 was, basically went mad with syphilis.

• 18:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Which is true. Yeah, he did.

• 18:47Tom Holland?

  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.

• 19:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Whitechapel.

• 19:10Tom Holland?

  Talking about people who would stick out like a sore thumb, I think after the kind of 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 he, 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.

• 19:40Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he's a lovely bloke, right? He's a really, really lovely guy. He's not going to have done it.

• 19:45Tom Holland?

  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.

• 19:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, the guy who shot John Wilkes Booth.

• 20:00Tom Holland?

  And he had, people may remember, he had castrated himself after being propositioned by a prostitute. He was so upset by this that he hacked his testicles off. And then in due course, he gets, 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?

• 20:22Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 and 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.

• 20:41Tom Holland?

  Yes. And, you know, nobody knows what happens to him once he's left the asylum. So it's perfectly plausible.

• 20:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, he could have crossed the Atlantic.

• 20:49Tom Holland?

  Crossed 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 Saxcarburg, isn't it?

• 21:10Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 is 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.

• 21:41Tom Holland?

  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 into the West End? And there is no one more upper class than a royal, right?

• 21:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I definitely think so. I think it's a kind of, he's the pleasingly populist candidate, isn't he? Because it would be satisfying for a lot of people to think that these. The 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 Seventh. So he is second in line to the British throne. So he is, you know, he's an important person. He was born in eighteen sixty four, 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 eighteen ninety two. 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

• 22:41Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 eighteen eighty nine 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 equerry, 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

• 23:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 that obviously sweeps up Oscar Wilde at the same time, because this is part of the background to the Oscar Wilde trial. Anyway, in eighteen ninety two, Prince Eddie died at twenty eight. 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 twentieth century, when you would

• 24:07Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 says the, 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

• 24:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 V. Right. Good. George V is the least likely person ever to have been Jack the Ripper. Although loved a stamp and stamps will be featuring as well. Yes, there is the stamp, isn't there? So, but also, I mean, George V did have a he had a beard though, didn't he? He was bearded and, and also he had an unusual way of creasing his trousers, which would have been identifiable to witnesses, right? He creased them at the sides. Okay. So the argument about Prince Eddie is that he's dissolute, 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

• 25:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  for revenge. He killed Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. 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, was not correct. So Dominic, any problems with this theory? Loads of problems. So first of all, Stowell claims that he got this information from the, the secret notes of the prince's doctor, Sir William Gull, a man we'll 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

• 26:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  a massive hurdle for the Prince Eddie theory. The prince does not have a close working knowledge of, of the allies of Whitechapel. And he would stand out massively. He's not a working man. He's very, he's taller than the Ripper descriptions. He, you know, he's immediately identifiable. His voice would give him away.

• 26:41Tom Holland?

  He's got a weak chin, hasn't he? No one has a weak chin in the East End.

• 26:45Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. 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 Catherine Eddes. 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, this theory is rubbish. But then in the 1970s, it gets a twist. And I'm sorry to say, it gets the twist originally

• 27:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, Z-Cars, who sort of were investigating the crimes. And in the final episode, they had an interviewee 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.

• 28:10Tom Holland?

  Yes. So, 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.

• 28:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  Bad sign.

• 28:25Tom Holland?

  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. Sickert introduces the prince to one of his models, who is a Catholic working class girl called Annie Crook. And again, like Walter Sickert, 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.

• 29:07Tom Holland?

  And in From Hell, she is played by Joanna Page, who people in Britain would have seen Gavin and Stacey. She's Stacey and she ends up in a very bad way, shaved and lobotomised 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 constitutional 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.

• 29:51Tom Holland?

  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 the, in this cover up. Because Annie had 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 Eddowes. And they team up to blackmail Lord Salisbury and the whole British government.

• 30:29Tom Holland?

  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. 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

• 31:12Tom Holland?

  in Switzerland. So people might think that's potentially a slight issue. And they also, they murder Catherine Eddes, and that's a case of mistaken identity.

• 31:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, yeah. Because she was a jolly person and would never have blackmailed the...

• 31:24Tom Holland?

  She would never have joined in a blackmail attempt against Lord Salisbury. And this book, kind of like Graham Hancock or Eric von Daniken, it was a huge success, and its impact was completely disproportionate 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.

• 31:59Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you find it plausible, Tom?

• 32:01Tom Holland?

  Okay, so there are a number of problems with this, a number of issues with 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 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 impossible. How do you get a carriage into, you know, all these various courtyards or narrow alleys or whatever?

• 32:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 32:40Tom Holland?

  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.

• 32:59Tom Holland?

  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, Dominic, 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, he made breakthroughs in Bright's disease and paraplegia and, and the study of anorexia, a word which, incidentally, was coined by James the First. So people who heard my episode on James the First will remember that. And I think it's, it's a great shame that he's ended up reduced in this way.

• 33:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  If you had said to Sir William Gull, and indeed anybody who knew him, he will be mainly remembered in more than a hundred 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.

• 33:53Tom Holland?

  I think he would have been very upset. I don't think he'd have laughed.

• 33:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  He would have been upset, yeah.

• 33:57Tom Holland?

  But Dominic, you said that Walter Sickert, the artist, that he is a further suspect, isn't he? So this is the, the kind of the next twist in this particular riff.

• 34:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yes. So obviously Sir William Gull is a ridiculous candidate, but the royal conspiracy theory or the, or versions of this conspiracy theory will not die. And in the, some versions of the Gull conspiracy theory, the artist Sickert is part of the conspiracy. And actually, he's now taken centre stage for some sort of ripperologists. So let's look at him. Sickert 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 Sickert was first proposed in 1959

• 34:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  by a guy called Donald McCormick, who wrote kind of, he 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, the lengths of buying 30 Sickert paintings and she's written two books about it. And bizarrely, she's been accused of destroying a Sickert painting, hasn't she? As part of her research, but she denies this.

• 35:17Tom Holland?

  I have to say, her novels are brilliant. I love them. Kay Scarpetta.

• 35:20Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, I've never read them. Does she not share a publisher with you, Tom?

• 35:24Tom Holland?

  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.

• 35:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Well, let's see. Let's see, right? So Sickert is born in 1860. So he is the right age. He's in his late twenties when the, he's 28 when the killings happen. Sickert was fascinated by city culture, by kind of seediness, by prostitution, by musical scenes. He painted lots of pictures of lodging houses and dos houses. This is not terribly unusual in the late 1880s. I mean, he's very influenced by the French impressionists, by Edgar Degas in particular. We know that he was fascinated by murders and mysteries. So he's very interested in a case that we've done before on this podcast with Zadie Smith, The Case of the Titchborne Claimant. He was really interested in that. Sickert painted a picture called Jack the Ripper's Bedroom in 1906. It was his bedroom of his own lodging house

• 36:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  in Six Mornings in Crescent, and the landlady told him that she thought the previous tenant had been Jack the Ripper.

• 36:25Tom Holland?

  We don't know on what basis, though.

• 36:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, she said, he used to go out a lot at night and I noticed he went out on the nights of the killings. Of course, if Sickert 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 a prostitute called Emily Dimmock, and she was murdered in her lodging house bedroom in, I think, 1908. And the case was very much in the news at the time. And Sickert'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. Sickert was a great self-publicist.

• 37:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  He had a brilliant eye for getting people's attention. And then 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 Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.

• 37:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  That Sickert arranged the 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.

• 38:06Tom Holland?

  I mean, and if it's Mary Jane Kelly, they certainly don't replicate the horror of her dismemberment.

• 38:12Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Casebook, I think, Jack the Ripper Casebook or something. And there's an essay on this website by Arco Wolf van der Linden. All about Sickert's art and whether it relates to the Ripper. And he points out that Sickert painted prostitutes in Venice in 1903. And he wrote afterwards how much he enjoyed doing it. They were, he loved working with them, these pretty obliging little models. Who laugh and unembarrassedly be themselves while posing like angels. It's an uninterrupted joy to paint them. And van der Linden says in his essay, this doesn't sound like a serial killer talking about his victims.

• 38:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 and George V. Patricia Cornwall got some DNA from a stamp licked by Walter Sickert. 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 many, as much as 10% of the population could have the same DNA.

• 39:26Tom Holland?

  And the letters are hoaxes, almost certainly.

• 39:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  And if the letters are hoaxes, which they probably are, then that doesn't tell you anything.

• 39:33Tom Holland?

  So I think DNA testing is a kind of, it seems like a massive opportunity for Ripperologists. But there is barely an example of it being used that doesn't come across as mad.

• 39:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  Exactly.

• 39:44Tom Holland?

  I think it's a kind of a terrible temptation that should be resisted.

• 39:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  There are a couple of other big problems with the Walter Sickert thesis. Number one, Walter Sickert 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.

• 40:03Tom Holland?

  The youthful je dispris.

• 40:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, we've all behaved badly in our youth, haven't we, at times? The other thing is Walter Sickert 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, in the studio chat of this podcast, Elia, who was herself German, says, never trust a German. So maybe that we should put that into the balance as well. And maybe she's, maybe she's right and Sickert is the culprit.

• 40:41Tom Holland?

  But if, if Elia is German and says, never trust a German, you can't trust her.

• 40:44Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's the Cretan liar, right?

• 40:45Tom Holland?

  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.

• 41:07Dominic Sandbrook?

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• 41:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  This episode is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. Tom, as you know, I spent all my time working and in a dream world, I would clone a sort of Tom Holland who would do all the work for me. But sadly, technology has not advanced to that point. If it did, I wish there was a recruiting company that I could. Could use to hire that clone for me.

• 42:07Tom Holland?

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• 42:51Tom Holland?

  This episode is supported by Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Now, history's biggest leaps started as hard questions that people didn't want asked.

• 43:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, there's a classic example of that at the end of the 15th century. And the hard question in particular was, what is out there beyond the Atlantic Ocean to the west? And as you will know, the man who found the answer to that question was the explorer Christopher Columbus. And he realises, or rather, everybody else realises, that there is a vast continent out there, and it is, of course, the Americas. So Anthropic knows the importance of questions, and it's why Anthropic is founded on one hard question above all. How can we ensure that the AI revolution really goes well for ordinary people? So they asked over 100,000 people, and what came back wasn't just fear, there was hope as well. People wanted to know, will cancer ever be cured? Can kids have a better future? It turns out that there is hope in hard questions.

• 43:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Ask yours at claude.ai/RestIsHistory and keep thinking.

• 43:58Dominic Sandbrook?

  Welcome back to The Rest is 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 Aberline. So this is somebody who knew the case better than anybody. He knew Whitechapel. He was regarded by his peers. They compared him with a bank manager.

• 44:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's the soul of respectability and hard work. And yet, he too has some mad theories, Tom, right?

• 44:45Tom Holland?

  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

• 45:25Tom Holland?

  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 people, you know, 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?

• 46:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah.

• 46:09Tom Holland?

  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, um, you know, when the, 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, I, um, I put to my wife Sadie last night when we were talking about this, is a midwife. Sadie's a midwife and she, she wasn't very happy with this theory. But just to, to, to give Abeline's reasons for proposing it, it would be perfectly natural for a midwife to be out late at night.

• 46:53Tom Holland?

  You know, there's no rhyme or reason as to when babies are being delivered. So perfectly acceptable. Midwives are dealing with blood. So again, uh, if her, her skirts are spattered with blood, I mean, that would be unsurprising. And of course, Dominic, you mentioned that the killer displays anatomical knowledge. Of course, the midwife absolutely has anatomical knowledge. And there's been, um, 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, um, this theory is called the Jill the Ripper theory.

• 47:34Dominic Sandbrook?

  Aliyah calls it the Jackie the Ripper theory.

• 47:36Tom Holland?

  Yeah, it's, it's, I mean, I like Jackie the Ripper, but it's, it's, um, it's recorded in the annals of Ripperology as Jill the Ripper. And you can't disprove it.

• 47:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 48:02Tom Holland?

  Right. And what is the motivation?

• 48:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 48:11Tom Holland?

  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? So

• 48:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Much more plausible.

• 48:26Tom Holland?

  So Philip Sugden, it's kind of says unproven on this.

• 48:29Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Kozowski in Nigorna in Poland in 1865. And he became a surgeon's apprentice. He went to Warsaw. He trained in surgery at the Praga Hospital in Warsaw. Sometime in late 1887 or early 1888, Kozowski 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 Zagowski.

• 49:11Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 immigrate 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, Kozowski is a barber in Leightonstone 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

• 49:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  each of them with a thing called tartar emetic, which is a white powder. It's soluble in water. 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 Maud Marsh's family demanded an investigation. The bodies are exhumed. Antimony preserves the bodies, so he is detected and he is caught and he is hanged. And in court, one writer who was watching him said, he seemed a particularly callous murderer.

• 50:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Kozowski is a very unpleasant man. Why would he be the Ripper? So this is Abeline's theory. Abeline laid out his thoughts in 1903 to a reporter from the Pall Mall 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 don't forget, he trained as a surgeon's apprentice.

• 51:21Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's within walking distance of all the murder sites. He is a white man of medium height in his twenties, 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?

• 52:06Dominic Sandbrook?

  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

• 52:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  mode of killing is so stark that psychologically I struggle to see how it makes sense, frankly.

• 52:53Tom Holland?

  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.

• 53:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  Right. Now, I can see how the, I could 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, I'm not a serial killer, so to go the other way around. Anyway, but it's, Abeline wasn't the only policeman, was he, to come up with a list of plausible suspects? Because there's a guy called Sir Melville MacNorton, and he has his own list, doesn't he?

• 53:30Tom Holland?

  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 MacNorton, who would go on to become Sir Melville MacNorton. 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 Eton, and he was the youngest son of the chairman of the East India Company, interestingly. And Sogden says of him, "It was said of him that he owned to only two disappointments in his life."

• 54:13Tom Holland?

  One was that he was turned out of the Eaton Eleven 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 1905. And he's also the person who directs the investigation into the case that sees the arrest of Dr. Crippen. So probably the most famous murderer after Jack the Ripper in British criminal history. So as I say, very serious figure.

• 54:55Tom Holland?

  And when he writes this memorandum on, in February 1894, he is the Assistant Chief Constable at the Metropolitan Police. And he writes this memorandum on, on the Ripper to repudiate claims in The Sun, the newspaper, that a man called Thomas Cutbush was the Ripper. And Cutbush had been arrested in 1891 after an attack on one girl and attempted 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.

• 55:36Tom Holland?

  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 Abba 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 McNorton, in this memorandum acknowledges upfront that no one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer. Many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof could be thrown on anyone.

• 56:19Tom Holland?

  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 McNorton then goes on to list three men, and he says, "anyone of whom would have been more likely than Cuthbert 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?

• 56:55Dominic Sandbrook?

  All right. So he's a man called Aaron Kosminski. Now McNorton 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 Kosminski? Kosminski was, at the time of the murders, he was an unmarried barber from a Polish Jewish background. And actually, I mentioned riprologists before.

• 57:39Dominic Sandbrook?

  There's a riprologist called Robert House, who did loads of research on Kosminski's background and turned up lots of stuff that actually supersedes the description in Philip Selton's book. So what we now know about Kosminski is he's born in a place called Kwadrwa 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 barber's assistant, 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.

• 58:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  As 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.

• 59:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  But then it goes on to say, apathetic as a rule and refuses to occupy himself in any way, habits cleanly, health, fair. And there are similar notes on him all the way through 1900s and 1910s, then he ends up dying in 1919. So, is this guy Kosminski the Ripper? If you go back to what MacNorton said, MacNorton 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. MacNorton there is either misinformed, or he's repeating gossip, or he's just making stuff up.

• 59:51Tom Holland?

  He is removed to a lunatic asylum, isn't he?

• 59:53Dominic Sandbrook?

  He is.

• 59:53Tom Holland?

  About March 1889, so that would explain why the murders stopped, perhaps?

• 59:57Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Kosminski is. What is more? There is no reason at all to believe that Kosminski has any anatomical knowledge

• 1:00:38Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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 Eddo's shawl. I mean, it's one step up from he'd bought it on eBay or something like that.

• 1:01:17Tom Holland?

  Because there's no evidence that it was Catherine Eddo's shawl.

• 1:01:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  No, no evidence at all. And also, loads of people had 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 Kosminski, there's any reason to believe this guy Kosminski 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 murders end. But apart from that, he just, to me, he just doesn't fit the bill at all.

• 1:01:52Tom Holland?

  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 III being Richard III 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 Kosminski. And so it kind of confirms to me, in my opinion, that AI is absolutely capable of spouting absolute rubbish.

• 1:02:33Dominic Sandbrook?

  But as you say, Dominic, the one thing in his favor is that there's an explanation for why the murder stopped, because Kosminski is put into an asylum early in 1889.

• 1:02:42Tom Holland?

  And with a second candidate, a guy called Montague John Drueitt, there is the same thing that clearly appealed to McNorton because, well, as we'll see, there's a reason why if Drueitt was Jack the Ripper, why he would have stopped after Miller's Court.

• 1:02:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  And to be clear, for McNorton, Drueitt is by far the leading candidate, right?

• 1:03:01Tom Holland?

  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 Drueitt. So Mr. M. J. Drueitt, Montague John Drueitt, "A doctor of about forty-one 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 thirty-first of December, i.e. seven weeks after the said murder." So that basically is why McNorton thinks that he is such a likely candidate. "The body was said to have been in the water for a month or more, or 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

• 1:03:43Tom Holland?

  the Whitechapel murderer. It was alleged that he was sexually insane." Now, Montague Drueitt 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 eighteen eighty-eight playing cricket variously in Dorset and Blackheath, which is now a part of South East 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

• 1:04:26Tom Holland?

  at a boarding school there. So he's very well off. He's both a barrister and a school teacher. And, you know, he has an active social life. He seems to be very popular. He seems to have his whole life before him. But then, as as McNorton says in his memorandum, on the thirty first of December eighteen eight, his 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 McNorton's theory

• 1:05:07Tom Holland?

  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 McNorton'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 we're not psychologists, but I gather that this is not how serial killers operate. There

• 1:05:46Tom Holland?

  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 Druid theory, because there isn't really any other evidence aside from that that he might have been the murderer.

• 1:06:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  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?

• 1:06:17Tom Holland?

  His his mother had been confined to an asylum in July eighteen eighty eight. So I don't know, perhaps he's he's upset about that, perhaps depression runs in the family. I mean, there's no Evidence aside from what McNorton says that he was insane, let alone sexually insane, nor is there any evidence that anyone has ever found that Drueitt's family suspected him of having been the Ripper beyond what McNorton says. And it's notable that even McNorton is expressing himself in a kind of quite a havoring way. So I have little doubt but that. I mean, that's, you know, he's not saying he definitely was.

• 1:06:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  On the other hand, he's a cricketer. So that's a definite, that's a very bad sign.

• 1:07:00Tom Holland?

  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 first of September, which is the day after Polly Nichols had been murdered, Drueitt is down in Dorset playing cricket. And on the eighth of September, which is the day of Annie Chapman's murder, he is playing for Blackheath in a match that had begun at 11:30. So it's conceivable, I suppose, that he could have left Whitechapel and got across the Thames and brushed, you know, had a shave and got out his cricket whites and turned up at the ground by 11:30. But I don't think that's really adequate preparation for opening the batting. So I don't think Montague Drueitt was it.

• 1:07:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Okay, fine. So let's turn to the third person that McNorton names, and this is Michael Ostrog. So to quote his report, "Michael Ostrog, 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," this is 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 Ostrog 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 Ostrog was born in the Russian Empire

• 1:08:26Dominic Sandbrook?

  in the early 1830s and he emigrated at some stage to England. We don't know why. Remember that McNorton 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 Oriole and New College. He's been passing himself off as a German student called Max Greif Goslar 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's Stortford.

• 1:09:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  He has been posing as Count Sobievsky, a Polish nobleman who's escaped from exile in Siberia. And he goes around Bishop's Stortford saying to people, I'm this count or whatever. And to quote from, I think it's from Philip Sugden's book, "At the coach and horses, Ostrog 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 Tunbridge Wells to play the

• 1:09:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Polish, 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.

• 1:09:59Tom Holland?

  Because at this point, Poland doesn't exist, does it?

• 1:10:01Dominic Sandbrook?

  It doesn't exist, exactly. He goes to Woolwich Barracks in 1873. There 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? Monor ton went to Eton, right?

• 1:10:23Tom Holland?

  Yes.

• 1:10:24Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's got an Ostro pilfering his old school. Ostro 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 schoolteachers, a Mr Browning, believes his stories 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 Ostrog. And he's in and out of prison and he's up sometimes in the newspapers, people will

• 1:11:04Dominic Sandbrook?

  say this bonkers con man has turned up in our town stealing silver cups and Spanish dictionaries.

• 1:11:11Tom Holland?

  But there's no record of any, any violence or anatomical knowledge or wearing deer stalker caps or any of these kind of things?

• 1:11:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Inn Burton on Trent. But that is the only time he has, he has in any way behaved, anything other, he's basically a, he's a, is he a, is he a bounder? He's probably not quite.

• 1:11:42Tom Holland?

  He's a kleptomaniac, surely.

• 1:11:43Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a kleptomaniac and a massive bounder who's impersonating, yeah, Tabby says a blighter. I mean, he's, he's, 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 to be able to play the Polish national anthem. He also wears often clerical garb.

• 1:12:03Tom Holland?

  Like Calvin Robinson.

• 1:12:05Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, he's not a lunatic. Like, he's just a bad bloke. He's just a petty criminal.

• 1:12:24Tom Holland?

  Is he out of the asylum in the summer of 1888?

• 1:12:27Dominic Sandbrook?

  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, 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, you know, 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

• 1:13:09Dominic Sandbrook?

  so many accounts that say the Ripper is probably five foot five, five foot six, he's too tall. He is far too old. He's in his mid 50s and he has absolutely no record of violence or sexual assault. He's a practised con 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 de 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 him. So I think here, McNorton 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, has

• 1:13:54Dominic Sandbrook?

  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.

• 1:14:01Tom Holland?

  Okay, so, 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've 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, we'll, we'll end with. So, a recently proposed suspect 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 stopped. But he actually is the only suspect for the murders so far, who actually ends up murdered himself. Or, or was he?

• 1:14:45Tom Holland?

  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, 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?

• 1:15:30Tom Holland?

  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 Whitechapel, plus two further ones. And although I've said it's, it's anonymous, the circumstantial evidence makes it clear that Maybrick... 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 the, in this diary, a reason is given for why Maybrick might be Jack the Ripper. And listeners can decide whether they think it's plausible.

• 1:16:15Tom Holland?

  So in this diary, he's, the, James Maybrick 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.

• 1:16:30Dominic Sandbrook?

  Of Liverpool?

• 1:16:31Tom Holland?

  Of Liverpool. And he is so angry and upset about this that he goes down to the Whitechapel in London and murders five prostitutes there.

• 1:16:42Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, that makes sense.

• 1:16:46Tom Holland?

  You know, I leave that for, for readers to decide.

• 1:16:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  That's a bonkers, that's a bonkers claim.

• 1:16:51Tom Holland?

  Now, Dominic, you're sounding skeptical. 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, J. Maybrick, and the initials of the five victims.

• 1:17:13Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh, come on. That's, that's laughable. That's, did Jack the Ripper walk around with his name on a pocket watch and the initials of his victims come on?

• 1:17:23Tom Holland?

  Well, that's what this pocket watch seems to suggest.

• 1:17:25Dominic Sandbrook?

  Purely, purely because his wife had been carrying on in a district of the same name in a different city.

• 1:17:31Tom Holland?

  Well, shall we, shall we find out how this, how this journal turned up?

• 1:17:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  Shall we do the provenance of these important artefacts?

• 1:17:38Tom Holland?

  Okay, well, it was produced by an unemployed scrap metal dealer in Liverpool, who claimed he'd been given it the, the year before by a mate in a pub.

• 1:17:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  Oh my god.

• 1:17:53Tom Holland?

  So he then subsequently confessed to having faked it. But he did then retract his confession. A further issue with with taking this as a 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 Maybrook still appears on it, but it's so clearly and palpably a fake. And it's interesting because of course, what it what it will probably remind people of is the Hitler diaries fake. And in a sense, there's clearly a yearning for people to be given the innermost thoughts

• 1:18:38Tom Holland?

  of people who are seen as the images of absolute evil. And I guess that Jack the Ripper, you know, and Hitler in that sense are, you know, much of a muchness. But I think it is clearly a fake.

• 1:18:51Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 Tumbulty. Now Francis Tumbulty, a bit like Ostrog, 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, is 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."

• 1:19:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  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. Crippen. He sells, he sells kind of mad products that any sane person would surely recognise as ludicrous. So Dr. Morse's Indian root pills or Tumbulty's 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.

• 1:20:19Dominic Sandbrook?

  So because he's just such a shady and mad character and his life is so Baroque that I can't possibly summarise 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 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 Tumbulty by an American journalist, Charles Dunham,

• 1:21:02Dominic Sandbrook?

  who knew him. And Tumbulty 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 a bit weird and sinister. And he told Dunham that he hated women, he saw them as sinful, you know, he had, 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, Tumbulty was almost certainly gay. We know this because in November 1888, because he would travel between America and Britain,

• 1:21:47Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 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

• 1:22:32Dominic Sandbrook?

  frankly weird. The argument against: he's a bit too tall, he's five foot 10. He's visited Europe and Britain many times, but there's no evidence that he's especially familiar with the East End. As you pointed out, Tom, his enormous moustache.

• 1:22:48Dominic Sandbrook?

  Have you seen his moustache online?

• 1:22:50Tom Holland?

  I have.

• 1:22:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  It's bonkers. He's got a truly massive moustache, especially if he's got that and he's wearing his crushed and spiked helmet. He's very, very.

• 1:22:59Tom Holland?

  Blending in. The Elephant Man and W G Grace.

• 1:23:03Dominic Sandbrook?

  He's a bad man, but he's not, 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, it's a struggle, it's a stretch to think that Tumblety, I think, is the Ripper.

• 1:23:24Tom Holland?

  Okay, so that's him eliminated as well. So there's just one final collection of, 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.

• 1:24:00Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, but he was making that up, surely.

• 1:24:03Tom Holland?

  Yeah, so Charles Lechmere, who people may have forgotten him, but he is the guy who first came across Polly Nicholls' 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 Ripperologist. And then it was the subject of a Channel Five documentary in 2014. And the circumstantial evidence for that is that, at the inquest.

• 1:24:40Tom Holland?

  Charles Lechmere 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, it's, 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

• 1:25:23Tom Holland?

  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, coming back from work throughout the night. And I think that that is a salient fact that does deserve to be borne in mind.

• 1:25:56Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, all right. So, Tom, I think the time has come before Tabby and Alia lose the will to live to, for us to pronounce. So of the suspects we have mentioned, which do you think is the most plausible?

• 1:26:14Tom Holland?

  Well, I actually think Charles Lechmere.

• 1:26:16Dominic Sandbrook?

  Do you?

• 1:26:16Tom Holland?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  But I mean, you have absolutely no evidence.

• 1:26:19Tom Holland?

  We have positive evidence for basically all the others that they couldn't have done it.

• 1:26:23Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, so I, going through it all, I think Kosminski, he's not a violent man. Montague Drewett, he surely doesn't know the East End, right?

• 1:26:34Tom Holland?

  And he's playing cricket.

• 1:26:35Dominic Sandbrook?

  I mean, the cricket thing is a bad sign, but I'm prepared to overlook that in this case. Ostrog, no history of violence at all. Who else have we got?

• 1:26:44Tom Holland?

  Jill the Ripper, improbable.

• 1:26:46Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah, and George Chapman, or Kwazowski is his, is his, 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.

• 1:27:01Tom Holland?

  He collects organs in 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 Francis Tumblety, 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 now say who I think is the likeliest? Go on. So this relates to where Polly Nichols is found.

• 1:27:42Tom Holland?

  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 1884, 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 knacker'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 Buck's Row where Polly Nichols was found.

• 1:28:25Tom Holland?

  So this knacker's yard is between Buck's 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 knacker man told him that he had cut up about 2,000 horses annually. So there's a lot of dismemberment. As a knacker 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.

• 1:29:08Tom Holland?

  But it's not just about the dismembering of corpses, because essentially, there is no part of a horse that a knacker'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 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

• 1:29:51Tom Holland?

  in Nakas' 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 the her corpse. And these are James Mumford, Henry Tompkins, and Charles Breton. And they gave the details of their their kind of movements that night at the inquest. And they said that they started work between

• 1:30:33Tom Holland?

  eight and nine PM, so the previous evening, so that's the Thursday, they'd finished it at four twenty AM on the Friday morning. So that's, you know, 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 one AM, 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 the the yard that is right next to the murder site. If he lives eastwards, he would

• 1:31:16Tom Holland?

  have gone down Hanbury Street, that would have been the route he would have taken. Annie Chapman is the next murder victim. So I I think that is entirely possible, that someone who is working in that Nakas' 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.

• 1:32:01Tom Holland?

  And I could imagine a case in which, you know, you're a child, you 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 the process of of murder, as we've said, escalates. And the other thing, it's 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

• 1:32:41Tom Holland?

  interests have a disproportionate number of arrests for violent crimes and sexual offences.

• 1:32:50Dominic Sandbrook?

  Really? That's an interesting fact.

• 1:32:52Tom Holland?

  So, you know, I can't give a name. But if I had to to to name someone, I, you know, if I was Inspector Abeline, I would have, I think, interrogated the workers in that Macca's Yard quite intensively.

• 1:33:08Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 deerstalker 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.

• 1:33:52Dominic Sandbrook?

  I think such people would probably stand out. They're too, 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, 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? Would you, 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 a guy you suspect of being a madman? So I think he's a, I think, I did think about somebody who works in a slaughterhouse, or I thought about a butcher,

• 1:34:36Dominic Sandbrook?

  somebody who's used to wielding a knife, but I, and has a degree of anatomical knowledge. But don't forget that 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 eighteen, late eighteen eighties, which actually we're the heirs to, this kind of populist 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 have been able to address, of course, is the question of why the murders stop. I think he's perhaps arrested for, for some other violent crime and was put away.

• 1:35:17Dominic Sandbrook?

  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 was killed in what is a colossal pandemic. And just 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 Jack 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 in the history of the podcast.

• 1:36:02Tom Holland?

  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.

• 1:36:18Dominic Sandbrook?

  For a while? That's, that sounds ominous.

• 1:36:20Tom Holland?

  Well, never say never, never say never. But thanks so much for listening and happy Christmas.

• 1:36:28Dominic Sandbrook?

  Yeah. Bye bye.

• 1:36:30Tom Holland?

  Bye bye.

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