Jack the Ripper - Unusual Suspects Pt 1

Dear Boss: The Paranoid Style Podcast is BACK!  And this week we're discussing one of the most infamous serial killings in history, the strange and horrible case of Jack the Ripper. We're a little Sherlock Holmes, a little Criminal Minds, and a whole lotta confused about the internal organs of the human body. But we won't let our bewilderment stop us from dipping a toe into the tuberculosis ridden waters of Ripperology! From the East End to the unsavor-iest parts of the East End. From four penny roach hotels to two penny hang overs. From Leather Aprons to Witch Babies (don't ask.) Find out if the Ripper is actually a baboon (spoiler alert, they aren't.) Ha Ha! Also, it's a two parter and The Paranoid Style is moving to bi-monthly releases to bring you the quality you expect from us. Ho Ho!

 Research Mentions:

Most Valuable Research Players: Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Introduction to the Case &

Book: "The Complete Jack the Ripper" by Donald Rumbelow

Other great sites with lots of clippings from newspapers at the time: The Newspaper Cuttings Library (jack-the-ripper.org) & Casebook: Jack the Ripper - Press Reports

Jack the Ripper Tour & Walk - Voted No.1 Ripper Walking Tour (thejacktherippertour.com) - This walking tour website had one of the best suspect listings I could find.  

Jack the Ripper: 1888 Autumn of Terror in Whitechapel, London (whitechapeljack.com) - Thoroughly detailed site with lots of images of historical documents related to the case

The Jack the Ripper murders: a modus operandi and signature analysis of the 1888–1891 Whitechapel murders - Keppel - 2005 - Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling - Wiley Online Library

Please subscribe where ever you get your podcasts. If you have any topic suggestions for the show or any tales to share, please email us at theparanoidstylepod@gmail.com and follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod or on twitter @style_paranoid. 

 Music used in this episode is from: Purple Planet Royalty Free Music.

 Opening theme music provided by Tony Molina. You can hear more of his music at https://tonymolina650.bandcamp.com/

Transcript

CCK: Cheerio, Sister!
 
ARK: … …
 
CCK: And glad tidings to you, Listeners!  Welcome to the Paranoid Style Podcast, where slap on our deerstalkers
 
ARK: We what now?
 
CCK: Put on our Sherlock Holmes hats, light up our pipes
 
ARK: Mine's an ocarina <plays ocarina>
 
CCK: and pull out our magnifying glass to investigate outlandish theories, farflung conspiracies, spooky creatures and discuss rupaul's drag race.
 
ARK: Not that last one. 
 
CCK: you suck.
 
ARK: And if you want to make sure you don't miss a single moment of this well-oiled Rube Goldberg contraption
 
CCK: Rube Goldberg who was born in San Francisco in 1883 was a Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist known for his drawings of absurd, whimsical and complex machines contrived to perform a simple operation.
 
ARK: My point exactly, follow us on Instagram @theparanoidstylepod and rate and subscribe to the Paranoid Style on your listening app of choice.
 
CCK: My name is Christine and I insisted on putting in that ocarina bit in to get some return on investment for the fancy Legend of Zelda Ocarina I bought but am unable to play because every time I do, my cat Bunny thinks she’s being attacked by owls. 
 
ARK: I'm Amanda and…
 
CCK: Just as a warning, we will be discussing a series of violent murders of women in the Victorian era, so listener discretion is advised. 

“The air you're breathing right now is also the same air that once circulated through the respiratory system of Jesus over 2000 years ago, which probably makes you feel a bit spiritual, doesn’t it? But unfortunately you’re also breathing the same air that once circulated through the body of Jack the Ripper, which probably makes you feel a bit shit”

Karl Wiggins

ARK: Are you trying to do a criminal minds thing?

CCK: Wheels up! Amanda, tell me what you know about Jack the Ripper!
ARK: Jack the Ripper brutally murdered at least 5 women in the East End area of London during a period of 71 days in 1888, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Despite more than a dozen witness statements from the time which describe the killer's appearance, and the concerted effort of the Metropolitan Police, and the continued efforts of amateur and professional investigators throughout the 134 years since the murders, Jack the Ripper was never caught, and their identity remains unknown.
CCK: Until NOW!
ARK: Wait what?
CCK: Well, I assumed we were going to solve the murders on our podcast. 
ARK: Christine, this is the Paranoid Style. We don’t solve things, we further complicate things by talking about wild theories and unusual suspects!
CCK: Oh, my bad. Please continue. 
ARK: In 1988, FBI profilers John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood attempted to create a profile of our unsub, the unknown subject known as Jack the Ripper. They used the system they helped create to detect and classify personality and behavioral characteristics for an individual based on analysis of their crimes. Douglas and Hazelwood took police reports and medical evidence related to the 1888 killings and they compiled a list of eleven character traits they believe the killer would have had. The Ripper was likely a white male between 25 and 35 years of age.
CCK: The average life expectancy for men in London in the 1880’s was around 44 years old, according to the UK Office of National Statistics. 
ARK: 44 was the new dead.
CCK: The profile also indicated that the killer would have lived locally to the East End area. The East End, which includes the districts of Spitalfield, Aldgate and Whitechapel was home to around 900,000 people in the 1880’s. The unsub would have been unmarried and a loner and as a child would have had an absent father and a dominant mother figure. Mommies are the real monsters! 
CCK & ARK: Hi Mom!
ARK: In several cases, Jack the Ripper timed their murders exactly to avoid a known patrol area for local constables so it would make sense that they lived locally or new the area extremely well.
CCK: Though there are now many examples of traveling serial killers, most serial killers tend to stay inside a comfort zone that is an area they are familiar with. A geographical profiler, which is someone who looks at locations of crimes to try to pinpoint where the killer might live, determined that Jack the Ripper probably lived in the area of Flower and Dean Street in east London, almost in the dead center of the 1 square mile where the killings took place.
ARK: The FBI profile also stated that the unsub would have a mental or physical disability or deformity, which made him feel different from others. He likely worked at a solitary job, away from social encounters and would seem quiet, timid and a bit odd to those who knew them.
CCK: I can just imagine them interviewing Jack the Ripper’s next door neighbor. “They seemed like such a mild mannered person. I remember he would sometimes wave at me when he came home at night drenched in gallons of blood. A bit solitary, but nothing out of the ordinary.”
ARK: There were no shortage of slaughterhouses in Whitechapel in 1888.  At one point police began investigating the 80 butchers and abattoirs located in the area in conjunction with the Ripper murders and one of the investigators stated that the smell that he encountered in these places would stay with him till his dying day. The prevalence of slaughterhouses does account for how a man covered in blood might escape suspicion walking the streets of the East End after committing murder.
CCK: Even though the killer may have seemed timid, the profile surmised that beneath the surface would lie a deep and resentful aggression, which would explode during bouts of low self-esteem and they would not feel remorse for any of their crimes in any way. The manner in which Jack the Ripper killed their victims and left them on public display for the most part, jibes with someone who has no remorse and showed an inhuman level of disdain for the women they murdered.
ARK: Interestingly, the FBI profile wasn’t the first profile done on Jack the Ripper. Towards the end of the Ripper’s murder spree, on October 25, 1888, the second Assistant Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police asked Dr. Thomas Bond, a surgeon and medical expert for the Met’s A Division, to review all of the evidence and to give his opinion on the matter.   

CCK: Bond examined all of the evidence for the first four murders and also conducted the autopsy on Mary Kelly, the final victim on November 9th. He delivered his report to the commissioner the day after Mary Kelly’s murder and made the following statements about the killer:

The first four murders were committed by someone who was left-handed.  In the case of the final murder, the mutilations were so extreme it was not possible to tell the direction of the slashes across the throat.

Bond’s report also stated:  In each case the mutilation was inflicted by a person who had no scientific nor anatomical knowledge. In my opinion he does not even possess the technical knowledge of a butcher or horse slaughterer or any person accustomed to cut up dead animals.  

ARK: The question of whether or not Jack the Ripper would have needed medical training or at least the level of anatomical knowledge that might have been available to someone who worked in a slaughterhouse in order to accomplish what he did to his victims remains a subject of debate. Though Bond did not feel the wounds were indicative of anatomical knowledge, several of the other doctors who examined the victims postmortem indicated the exact opposite opinion.

CCK: I have to say, I can probably identify a kidney on an anatomical illustration of the human body, but I do not think I would be able to find it inside an actual human body in the dark, in a hurry, with blood everywhere. Even surmising that maybe Jack the Ripper just took whatever organ was handy when he murdered his victims, I suspect I would find it extremely difficult to figure out how to move someone’s intestines out of the way to find what was underneath. I mean, like intestines probably have a film around them or sack or something to hold them together and maybe like some connectors to keep them…uh…connected?

ARK: Jack the Ripper may or may not have been an anatomical genius, but you my sister, are decidedly not.

CCK: True that. The neck bones connected to the hip bone, the hip bones connected to the knee bone. The knee bones connected to the…Humming the rest of the song.

ARK: Your headbone’s connected to your buttbone.

CCK: HEY!!

ARK: Bond’s report went on to say, that the murder weapon was a strong knife, very sharp and at least six inches long with a pointed tip and at least an inch in width. He thought that the Ripper was a man of physical strength and great calmness and daring to commit murder out in the open and he felt that there was only a single killer, no accomplices. Bond described Jack the Ripper “a man subject to periodical attacks of Homicidal and erotic mania. The character of the mutilations indicate that the man may be in a condition sexually, that may be called satyriasis.”

CCK: Satyriasis is the term used to describe uncontrollable or excessive sexual desire in a man and is the masculine counterpart to the term nymphomaniac.  
ARK: Bond continued: “The murderer in external appearance is quite likely to be a quiet inoffensive looking man probably middle-aged 
CCK: so 22.
ARK: “and neatly and respectably dressed. I think he must be in the habit of wearing a cloak or overcoat or he could hardly have escaped notice in the streets if the blood on his hands or clothes were visible. Assuming the murderer to be such a person as I have just described he would probably be solitary and eccentric in his habits, also he is most likely to be a man without regular occupation, but with some small income or pension. He is possibly living among respectable persons who have some knowledge of his character and habits and who may have grounds for suspicion that he is not quite right in his mind at times.”
CCK: The modern and contemporary profiles are quite close and in addition to these character profiles, we also have a general description based on the compiled eyewitness accounts of a man who was seen with multiple victims just prior to the murders. 
ARK: The traits which the witness accounts seem to agree on are that the murderer was between 5 foot 5 inches and 5 foot 7 inches or around 170 centimeters tall.  He was stocky with a full face.
CCK: Size 14.
ARK: He had dark hair and a dark moustache, was between 25 and 35 years old and had a fair complexion. So now that we have a picture of our killer, let’s talk about Jack the Ripper’s victims. 
CCK: The Canonical Five is the name given to Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly and designates the victims most likely to have all been murdered by the same person, Jack the Ripper, based on the similarities of their personal circumstances and the way in which they were murdered. This term was devised to differentiate them from 11 other murder victims with a similar profile in the Whitechapel area who were killed around the same time frame.

ARK: From the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling: “An evaluation of the murders revealed that six of those murders were linked by a number of distinct, personal signature characteristics, including picquerism, which is deriving sexual pleasure from penetrating the skin with sharp objects, overkill, incapacitation, domination and control, open and displayed unusual body position, sexual degradation, mutilation, organ harvesting, specific areas of attack, preplanning and organization, and a combination of signature features.” 

CCK: Six murders? Did you just not hear my speech about the Canonical Five?

ARK: Oh I heard it, but the Journal of Investigative Psychology and Offender Profiling, as well as many other Ripperologists, believe that at least one of the other eleven victims should be attributed to Jack the Ripper.

CCK: The term “Ripperologists”, according to the Oxford English Dictionary was coined officially in the 1970’s when it appeared in Donald Rumbelow’s book, “The Complete Jack the Ripper” which is still considered to be one of the best books on the subject. And if we needed more proof that interest in Jack the Ripper is still thriving, there is a magazine, published six times a year called, The Ripperologist. The magazine was first published in 1995, and PDF versions of most of its 166 issues are available on-line at “ripperologist.co.uk”. It is considered to be essential reading for serious students of the Ripper killings.
ARK: The sixth victim mentioned in the profile was Martha Tabram, who was killed 24 days before Mary Ann Nichols, the first of the canonical five. Martha did not have her throat slashed and the dissection that was done on later victims was not done to her body.  But she was stabbed over 39 times, so the overkill was definitely there and the wounds to her chest and abdomen might have been an early version of the Modus Operandi Jack the Ripper used in later murders.

CCK: In terms of who Martha was, her physical characteristics and history, that is where she really does seem to fit in with four of the five widely accepted Jack the Ripper Victims. Frequently, though not always, serial killers appear to have an “ideal victim” based on race, gender, physical characteristics, or some other specific quality, though accessibility and availability often dictate their actual victims. 

ARK: Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were all in their 40’s, living in poverty in the East End. They’d all been married and had children, and at some point, left their homes and families and ended up living within a one mile radius of each other. They were all short, between 5 feet to 5 foot 5 inches tall and appear to have all had drinking problems of varying degrees. They were all working, at least sometimes as prostitutes, though there is a book about the victims from 2019 called, “The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper” by Hallie Rubenhold which challenges that notion and suggests that possibly they were not sex workers and instead were just “sleeping rough” or sleeping on the street when Jack the Ripper found them.

CCK: Being forced to sleep on the street was a very real possibility for the 30% of the population in the East End of London in the 1880’s who fell into the economic categories of poor, those with a steady income of around 20 shillings per month, or 1 pound, the very poor, who made even less or did not have a steady income, and the 11,000 people below the very poor who weren’t even given a label. Mary Ann Nichols, the first of the canonical five victims had last been seen about an hour before her death by a girl who was sharing a room with her at a lodging house at 18 Thrawl Street in Spitalfields. Nichols did not have the four pence she needed to rent a bed for the night in the lodging house so she was heading back out to try and earn doss money, doss being British slang for “bed”. 

ARK: Bed is a strong word. In some lodging houses, four pence got you something more resembling a coffin, a wooden box, six feet long, two feet wide and eleven inches tall. Or for two pence you could sleep in a two-penny hangover, which was a bench with a rope strung out in front of it, and you could hang over the rope to keep from falling forward.  In the morning, the rope would be untied and everyone would tumble off of the bench to begin their day.

CCK: Apparently, as awful as the two penny hangover sounds, it did have the benefit of not trapping you in a box full of bugs and sometimes rats. Jack London came to the East End in 1902 to experience what life was like for the poorest of the poor in London, and described his experience of sleeping in a four pence bed as follows:

ARK: “The smell was frightful and sickening, while my imagination broke loose, and my skin crept and crawled till I was nearly frantic. Grunting, groaning, and snoring arose like the sounds emitted by some sea monster, and several times, afflicted by nightmare, one or another, by his shrieks and yells, aroused the lot of us. Toward morning I was awakened by a rat or some similar animal on my breast. In the quick transition from sleep to waking, before I was completely myself, I raised a shout to wake the dead. At any rate, I woke the living, and they cursed me roundly for my lack of manners.”

CCK: Sleeping on the street might be better.

ARK: Or not, picture it: London's East End, August 1888, it had been a miserably foggy, cold and rainy summer that year. And the East End wasn’t exactly paradise even on a sunny day, though like most areas in a big city, some parts were nicer than others. The area stalked by Jack the Ripper was not that nicer part. The East End was an industrial area and all of the wastes of those various industries, such as rope making, ship building, tallow processing for candles and the aforementioned slaughterhouses polluted the air and sidewalks. 

CCK: Diseases like Cholera, typhus, smallpox, tuberculosis and leprosy were constantly circulating and were made worse by the crowded living conditions in the poorest neighborhoods where families of 5 to 9 people would sometimes live in a single room. One in four children in the East End died before they reached the age of five. London as a whole housed about 50 people per acre.  In Whitechapel there were 176 people per acre.  In the Bell Lane area of Spitalfields, there were 800 people per acre. 

ARK: And it was into this abyss, set in the shadow of the tower of London which had been the site for the executions of five royal women in the 1500’s, Queen Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole, the Countess of Salisbury, Jane Boleyn, the Viscountess of Rochford, Queen Catherine Howard and Lady Jane Gray that an unknown murderer began a series of murders that have produced hundreds of books, tv shows and movies and this very episode.

CCK: In the early morning hours of August 31, 1888, the body of 43-year-old, Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly to her friends, was discovered by two market porters on their way to work. They initially thought she might just be passed out, but after a passing patrol man examined the woman with a police lamp it became clear that she was dead, though probably for less than a half hour as her body was still warm. 

ARK: Polly’s body was taken to the Old Montague Street Mortuary where she was examined by Dr Rees Llewellyn. The two stab wounds to her neck cut all the way down to the vertebrae, nearly decapitating her and there were vicious stab wounds to her genitals and abdomen that caused her bowels to protrude through the wounds. Llewellyn was a doctor with an office in the area near the murder, usually the coroner would summon a local surgeon to be first on the scene to perform the postmortem exam and testify upon the cause of death. Llewellyn did not examine any of the other Ripper victims.

CCK:  Mary Ann Nichols had been born, Mary Ann Walker in London in 1845. When she was 22, she married a man named William Nichols and they had 5 children together, 3 boys and 2 girls. Polly separated from William in 1881. The exact reason for their split is not clear.  William had an affair with the nurse who took care of Polly during her last pregnancy but he stated that was not the reason they broke up and said that she had left him multiple times and that her drinking was the reason for their split. Whatever the reason, after their separation, she ended up in several different Workhouses, including the Lambeth Workhouse.

ARK: Workhouses were not so much a social safety net designed to help the poor and unemployed so much as a nightmare set up to discourage poverty and unemployment. Once you were in the workhouse, you were forced to stay there for a certain amount of time, for example if they let you in on Wednesday, you couldn’t leave until Friday. You weren’t allowed tobacco and though you were provided breakfast, it was unfortunately something called skilly.

CCK: Skilly was watery oatmeal that frequently contained bonus rat poop. Two scoops of not raisins.

ARK: Strangely, that doesn’t sound worse than dinner. Back to our friend Jack London whose book about the East End called, “People of the Abyss” described eating an evening meal at the Whitechapel workhouse after a day of backbreaking labor working in the Infirmary, carrying contagious garbage down five flights of stairs where it was dumped into a mound and sprinkled with disinfectant.:

At eight o’clock we went down into a cellar under the infirmary, where tea was brought to us, and the hospital scraps. These were heaped high on a huge platter in an indescribable mess—pieces of bread, chunks of grease and fat pork, the burnt skin from the outside of roasted joints, bones, in short, all the leavings from the fingers and mouths of the sick ones suffering from all manner of diseases. Into this mess the men plunged their hands, digging, pawing, turning over, examining, rejecting, and scrambling for. It wasn’t pretty. Pigs couldn’t have done worse. But the poor devils were hungry, and they ate ravenously of the swill, and when they could eat no more they bundled what was left into their handkerchiefs and thrust it inside their shirts.

CCK: If Mary Ann Nichols was prostituting herself on the night she was killed, you can hardly blame her, the alternatives were few and just as awful. She was last seen about an hour before her death at 2:30AM on Whitechapel Road, by a friend, Emily Holland, who was returning from watching one of two large dock fires that evening. She told Holland, "I've had my doss money three times today and spent it." but, "It won't be long before I'm back." Holland described Nichols as being very drunk. A glass of gin cost 3 pence at this time. Nichols was also wearing what she had described as a jolly new bonnet she had purchased that day. 

ARK: Nichols was 5 foot 2 inches tall, with brown eyes and a dark complexion, she had brown hair that was going gray and looked years younger than her age. At the time of her death the East London Observer guessed her age at 30-35. A woman interviewed by the police described her as "a very clean woman who always seemed to keep to herself." 

CCK: There were no witnesses who had seen her with a man prior to her death and no one heard anything while the murder was taking place and there was no evidence found at the scene. Her possessions aside from her clothes, consisted of a comb, a white pocket handkerchief and a broken piece of mirror. 

ARK: The Metropolitan police did question local women and the only tip they were given was about a man known as “leather apron” who had been attacking women in the area and stealing what little money they had. The next murder would happen only nine days later on September 8th. The body of 47-year-old Annie Chapman, sometimes called Dark Annie for her dark brown hair, was discovered in the backyard of 29 Hanbury Street at a little before 6AM by a resident of the building. About a week before her death, Annie had been in a fight with another woman, over either a piece of soap or a man. She suffered a black eye and bruising to the chest and said she still felt unwell because of it a week later.  However, at her autopsy, the doctor also stated that if Annie had not been murdered, she would have been dead within a month due to a very advanced case of Tuberculosis. Tuberculosis is a contagious infection caused by the Mycobacterium tuberculosis bacteria that mainly affects the lungs but can also affect any other organ including bone, brain and spine. Tuberculosis is still one of the leading causes of death worldwide, with 1.5 million people dying of the disease in 2020. 

CCK: On the evening before her death on September 7th, Annie left her lodging house in Dorset street around 5PM.  She wasn’t feeling well, but she knew she would need some money if she was going to afford a bed that evening. She came back around 11:30 and asked to sit in the kitchen, but did not have her doss money. She told another lodger that she had gotten 5 pence from her sister, but as she seemed to be intoxicated at this point, she apparently spent that money on alcohol.

ARK: Which, frankly, who can blame her.  It’s freezing and rainy, she’s got frickin’ tuberculosis and no where to sleep.  I’d be drunk too. Anyway, she left the lodging house again at 1AM and returns at 1:30 with a baked potato, but no doss money. She asks the manager to hold her bed for her and leaves for the last time.

CCK: Annie was last seen alive by a woman named Elizabeth Long who saw her talking with a man at 5:30AM, near where her body was found. Long heard the man say "Will you?" and Annie replied "Yes." Long did not see the man’s face but described him as wearing a long coat and hat, looking foreign and being “shabby genteel”. At this time in London, calling someone foreign would be synonymous with Jewish, and anti-semitism would rear its ugly head again in the course of the Ripper investigations. 

ARK: A little after Elizabeth Long had seen Annie, a man who lived at 27 Hanbury Street, Albert Cadosch, walked out into his back yard to use the outhouse. Passing the five foot tall wooden fence which separated his yard from 29 Hanbury’s backyard, he hears voices. The only word he can make out is someone saying "No!" A little while later he again makes a trip to the outhouse, he’d recently had some kind of stomach surgery and this time he hears something falling against the fence. But his 29 Hanbury neighbors were packing crate makers so bumps against the fence weren’t that weird. Plus stomach surgery in 1888 cannot be easy to recover from so I would have also ignored any weird noises.  Also, I would have been drunk. 

CCK: Just before 6.00am, John Davis, an elderly carman

ARK: He was 56. 

CCK: who lived on the third floor of No.29 with his family, went into the backyard and per his testimony at Annie’s inquest, stated that he “saw a woman lying down in the lefthand recess, between the stone steps and the fence. She was on her back, with her head towards the house and her legs towards the wood shed. The clothes were up to her groins. I did not go into the yard, but left the house by the front door.” He called to some men passing the house and told them what happened and the police were summoned. 

ARK: In Victorian England Coroner Inquests were held in all cases of suspicious death to record all available evidence at the time, including witness statements, information about any evidence or interviews that had been done by the police and autopsy reports. This allowed a jury to issue a verdict confirming the cause of death, whether suicide, accident or murder. Like most of the physical evidence from the Ripper murders, the original transcripts for these inquests no longer exist, but large portions of them were reported in newspapers at the time and provide much of the information we have on the murders today.

CCK: The Coroner for the East End as well as the City of London at the time of the Ripper Murders was  a lawyer named Wynne Baxter. In 1907, Baxter said of his time as coroner: "I have held over 30,000 inquests, and have not had one body exhumed yet".

ARK: Humble Brag.

CCK: Dr. George Bagster Phillips was brought in to examine Annie’s body and conduct her autopsy.  Phillips would examine three of the Ripper victims, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Mary Jane Kelly. Chapman’s throat had been slashed twice, again all the way down to the spine, but there was evidence that she had been suffocated before that happened. Her intestines had been removed from her abdominal cavity, though were still attached internally, and were placed above her shoulder. The upper part of her uterus and part of her bladder had been cut out and were not found at the scene. She also had injuries to her hand, and it appears that three brass rings she had been wearing were forcibly removed from her finger and taken from the scene. 
ARK: Aside from her clothes and the missing rings, Annie’s only possessions were a scrap of muslin, one small tooth comb, a comb in a paper case and a scrap of envelope containing two pills which she possibly received in the infirmary after her fight the week before. 
CCK: Dr. Phillips believed that medical knowledge would have been needed to accomplish the mutilations and could have been done with a very sharp, thin blade at least 5 to 6 inches long though probably longer. He also stated that it would have taken at least a half an hour to accomplish the dissections. If Elizabeth Long was correct about the time she saw Annie talking with a man in front of 29 Hanbury, and based on the time that the body was discovered, it would have taken the killer less than fifteen minutes to complete the murder. 

ARK: Annie Chapman had been born Annie Eliza Smith in 1841 in London.  She was 5 feet tall, with a pale complexion and blue eyes. When she was 28, she married a coachman named, John Chapman. They had three children, two girls and a boy. The boy was severely disabled and sent to live in a home and one of the daughters died in 1882 of meningitis at the age of twelve. Both Annie and her husband were known to drink and this got worse after the death of their daughter. They separated around 1885 but until his death on Christmas day in 1886, John Chapman semi-regularly provided Annie 10 shillings per week. 

CCK: After his death, with the loss of the semi-regular income, Annie had a sharp decline in health and living circumstances and a friend reported that "since the death of her husband she seemed to have given away all together."

ARK: When Annie’s body was discovered, a leather apron, like those worn by butchers and other laborers and craftsmen at the time, was found on the scene, adding to the speculation that the “leather apron” man was involved in the killings, but the apron at Hanbury street was determined to belong to one of the residents there. 

CCK: The man known as Leather Apron, and our first suspect, was located and questioned after Annie’s Murder. John Pizer, who had been a neighbor of Annie Chapman’s at one time was tracked down and questioned, but had alibis for both murders and was released.  His testimony was also recorded at the inquest for Annie Chapman and he stated, “I wish to vindicate my character to the world at large.” The inquest recorded his alibis for both Polly and Annie’s murders and the coroner added, “It is only fair to say that the witness's statements can be corroborated.”

ARK: An especially unflattering description of Pizer in a London paper described him as “halfway between the Dickens character Quilp and Poe’s baboon.” This extreme caricature of Pizer seems likely to be the result of more antisemitism as Pizer, a shoemaker, was Jewish and from Poland.

CCK: Quilp was a character from Charles Dicken’s “The Old Curiosity Shop” who was a vicious, ill-tempered and grotesque character who lusted after the character Little Nell and hoped to marry her once he could dispose of the woman he was already married to. And Poe’s baboon refers to the orangutan that was revealed to be the murderer… 

ARK: SPOILER!

CCK: in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue. This description of Leather Apron was satirized 

ARK: Satyriasis? 

CCK: Different spelling, by George Sims an English Journalist and humorist who wrote: “The statement that the police believe the Whitechapel murders to have been committed by a baboon which recently escaped from a ship in the East India Docks is authoritatively denied, but Sir Charles Warren is understood to have said that it wanted Edgar Allan Poe at the yard to give them something to work on.” These multiple historical mentions of a baboon, led to a rumor which still persists in modern times that a baboon had been listed as an actual suspect in papers in 1888. 

ARK: Incidentally, John Pizer allegedly received a small monetary compensation from some of the newspapers that had printed the slanderous accusations of his guilt in the Ripper murders after it was proved that he could not have been the killer.  

CCK: In a testament to how invested people still are in these murders, I found a 111 post thread from 2017 that was an argument about whether or not Jack Pizer was the leather apron or simply a person in a leather apron. 

ARK: Another development that occurred after Annie Chapman’s murder was the receipt of a letter by the Central News Agency on September 27, 1888. There were many letters coming into the police and press from citizens concerned about the murders or with unflattering reviews of the police investigation, but the letter to the Central News Agency is one of three that stand out as having potentially come from the murderer themself.

CCK: The September 27 letter is known as the “Dear Boss” letter and is where the name Jack the Ripper comes from.  The one page letter is written in red ink, contains many misspellings, was dated September 25th and reads as follows:
ARK: Dear Boss, I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they wont fix me just yet. I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. That joke about Leather Apron gave me real fits. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled. Grand work the last job was. I gave the lady no time to squeal. How can they catch me now. I love my work and want to start again. You will soon hear of me with my funny little games. I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle over the last job to write with but it went thick like glue and I cant use it. Red ink is fit enough I hope ha. ha. The next job I do I shall clip the ladys ears off and send to the police officers just for jolly wouldn't you. Keep this letter back till I do a bit more work, then give it out straight. My knife's so nice and sharp I want to get to work right away if I get a chance. Good Luck.
Yours truly
Jack the Ripper
Dont mind me giving the trade name
PS Wasnt good enough to post this before I got all the red ink off my hands curse it No luck yet. They say I'm a doctor now. ha ha

CCK: Was ha ha, the Victorian version of LOL?

ARK: Apparently, and it also brings us to our second suspect. This is not someone who was ever arrested or questioned during the Ripper murders, which is actually the case with many of the suspects we will discuss. Also, dear listeners, in the interests of full disclosure we are not going to be able to go through all of the suspects ever identified because there are way to many, so we are mostly sticking with the weirder ones and our #2 is one of the weirdest. 

CCK: In two books by Richard Patterson,

ARK: You mean the Sparkle Vamp, AKA New Batman?

CCK: That’s Robert Pattinson, Richard Patterson, is a Professor of Philosophy at Emory University, who wrote two books about a poet named Francis Thompson who he believes to have been Jack the Ripper.

ARK: This suspect was first proposed in 1988 by Dr Joseph C Rupp a medical examiner in Texas. And the evidence, though circumstantial is compelling.  Francis Thompson was born in 1859, making him 29 at the time of the Ripper killings. Photos show him to be pale with dark eyes and hair. He attended a Roman Catholic seminary school until he was 18 and after that spent almost 8 years in medical school at what is now the University of Manchester, but had no interest in medicine, was rejected by the military for being too slight and in 1885 he fled penniless to London to try and make it as a writer.

CCK: About his time in medical school, Richard Patterson writes: “Some observers have stated that Thompson neglected his medical studies. Such claims, however, are inaccurate and originated only after his death. His enthusiasm for spending long hours with a scalpel at the college's mortuary led his sister Mary to observe 'Many a time he asked my father for 3 pounds or 4 pounds for dissecting fees so often that my father remarked what a number of corpses he was cutting up.' What did not interest Thompson was passing examinations and bringing his studies to an end. On the three occasions he was required to sit the final examinations he simply did not show up and as a consequence failed in his studies.”

ARK: For Thompson, London was rough going and a burgeoning opium addiction led him to the East End where at one point he contemplated suicide but was saved by the ghost of poet Thomas Chatterton who had committed suicide 100 years earlier.

CCK: I’ll assume that was the opium talking.

ARK:  Around this time Thompson stated that a prostitute, whose identity he never revealed, befriended him and gave him lodgings. Thompson later described her in his poetry as his saviour, but in his seminary days he had written about hating prostitutes for their immorality, and at some later point he mentioned being in Spitalfields to try and find a prostitute who had jilted him. 
CCK: In mid-November 1888, after the final Ripper murder, Thompson was 'discovered' after sending his poetry to the magazine Merrie England. The magazine's editors, Wilfrid and Alice Meynell, recognized the value of his work and sought him out, taking him into their home and then sending him for two years to Our Lady of England Priory, Storrington, to recover from his opium addiction. He continued to take opium but in much smaller doses only as needed to relieve nerve pain.
ARK: Francis wrote most of the poetry he is known for from 1888 – 1897, and after that turned to prose writing. The Meynell’s arranged for publication of his first book of Poems in 1893 and it was received very well by critics. The Bishop of London called his poem, The Hound of Heaven, "one of the most tremendous poems ever written." Thompson died in 1907 of tuberculosis.
CCK: Okay, so he was a Roman Catholic with all of its concomitant baggage about women and sexuality, and I say that as a lapsed Catholic. He was a medical student, maybe not a great one, but spent enough time with cadavers to make me uncomfortable. He was in the East End area around the time of the murders and fits most of the general Ripper physical description, though it sounds like he was slight where the Ripper was described as a bit of a chonk. His adoption by the Meynell’s at the end of 1888 could explain why the Ripper killings stopped, but being a Roman Catholic, wouldn’t he have been sort of Thou shalt not kill and also how does this connect with the Dear Boss letter.
ARK: I will now introduce you to a poem by our friend Francis which he submitted to Merrie England Magazine on the 23 of February 1887. It is called, “The Nightmare of the Witch-Babies”
CCK: I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
ARK: Be afraid, be very afraid. The poem starts:
A lusty knight
Ha! Ha!

CCK: HA HA??? WTF?

ARK: On a swart steed
Ho! Ho!
Rode upon the land
Where the silence feels alone
As he rides through a desolate streetscape, the knight catches sight of a beautiful woman.
'What is it sees he?
Ha! Ha!
There in the frightfulness?
Ho! Ho!
There he saw a maiden
Fairest fair:
Sad were her dusk eyes,
Long was her hair;
Sad were her dreaming eyes,
Misty her hair,
And strange was her garments' flow'
Soon he begins to stalk her.

CCK: Oh dear.

ARK: 'Swiftly he followed her
Ha! Ha!
Eagerly he followed her.
Ho! Ho!'
But then he discovers she is unclean.
'Lo, she corrupted!
Ho! Ho!' 

There are many stanzas detailing how he decides to kill her by slicing her stomach open so that he may find and kill any unborn offspring she may have and it ends with his delight at finding not just a single foetus but two.

'And its paunch [stomach] was rent [ripped]
Like a brasten [bursting] drum;
And the blubbered fat
From its belly doth come
It was a stream ran bloodily under the wall.
O Stream, you cannot run too red!
Under the wall.
With a sickening ooze - Hell made it so!
Two witch-babies, ho! ho! ho!'

CCK: Well, I mean, it’s too late to warn everyone about witch baby nightmares, but I think we can call it.  Francis Thompson was definitely the Ripper.

ARK: We have a lot more suspects, and two more letters and three more murders.

CCK: They’ll have to wait until our next episode, part two of Jack the Ripper in two weeks. The Paranoid Style Podcast in an effort to bring you the high quality

ARK: Ha Ha!

CCK: Content you expect from us

ARK: Ho ho!

CCK: Will be moving to bi-monthly releases. And now I need to figure out if a q-tip can be used to remove that poem from my brain.

ARK: It can’t. I already tried.