A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

een removed and taken away. The next morning, before the news had had time to reach the
newspapers, the Central News Agency received another ‘Jack the Ripper’ letter, regretting that he
had been interrupted, and so could not send the victims’ ears as promised. (There had been an
attempt to remove the second victim’s ear.)
Six weeks later, on 8 November 1888, the Ripper committed his last murder. This time he picked
up the woman - a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly - outside her
lodgings in Miller’s Court, Dorset Street. She was killed in her room at about 2 a.m. - neighbours
heard a cry of ‘Murder’ at this time but paid no attention - then the Ripper spent the remainder of
the night mutilating her, burning rags in the grate to provide light. When she was found the
following morning, the head had been almost severed from the body. Some of the entrails had been
hung over a picture frame. The heart lay beside her on the pillow, but her breasts were on the table.
One arm had been almost removed, and the killer had spent some time cutting the flesh from the
face - including the nose - and the legs. These mutilations must have taken him at least an hour.
Then the murders ceased. The killer was never identified, although Sir Melville Macnaghten, the
Commissioner of Police, later declared that the chief suspect had been a young and unsuccessful
barrister named Montague John Druitt, who had committed suicide by drowning three weeks after
this last murder. There have been many other candidates, from a sadistic midwife to the heir to the
throne, the Duke of Clarence. But most of the books about the Ripper are based upon what is
probably a false assumption: that the Ripper must have been known to many people as a maniac,
and that he (or she) would have stood out from the crowd as an unusual personality. The truth is
probably that the Ripper was some anonymous unknown, a street sweeper or market porter, whose
sadistic obsession was totally unsuspected by those who knew him. But the assumption tells us a
great deal about the impact of the murders. They seemed to be a deliberate outrage, like some
terrorist bombing, an ‘alienated’ man screaming defiance at society and taking enormous pleasure
in the shock he produces. The double murder, followed by the elaborate mutilation of the last
victim - the photograph makes it look like a butcher’s carcase - gives the impression of someone
shouting: ‘There - what about that?’
The odd thing is that the Victorians were only dimly aware that these were sexual murders. No
contemporary newspaper refers to them as sex crimes, although the murderer is often described as
‘morally insane’. Bernard Shaw said jokingly that the killer was probably a social reformer who
wanted to draw attention to the appalling conditions in the East End of London; but the comment
was more apposite than he realised. The Ripper was clearly a man who was insanely obsessed with
blood and stabbing and who was particularly fascinated by the womb. He was obsessively neat -
the bodies were always carefully arranged, sometimes with the contents of the pockets placed
symmetrically around them. But the most significant thing about him was that he felt totally
separated from society. Like Lacenaire, he probably experienced a state of detachment, a sense of
unreality, which vanished only when he killed or daydreamed about killing. Although he was
probably indifferent to the social conditions in the East End of London, he was nevertheless an
extreme product of Marx’s ‘alienated’ society.
The most sensational American case of the same decade was in some ways more remarkable than
that of Jack the Ripper. Hermann Webster Mudgett was born in 1860 in New Hampshire, became a
medical student at eighteen, got married, and practised his first swindle - an insurance fraud
involving the faked death of a patient - while still at medical school. He practised medicine in
Mooers Forks, New York State until 1886, then moved to Chicago, where he became ‘H. H.
Holmes’. There he began his career of murder, killing a friend, Dr Robert Leacock, for his life