Jack the Ripper (1888): Mary Jane Kelly

Jack the Ripper is the type unsolved investigation: a short autumn of police work, a thick press myth and a century of documents that name suspects without ever producing a trial. The contemporary file is inquests, beat reports, medical statements that this page will not quote for injury detail, and a small set of letters sent to press and to the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee. There was no fingerprint bureau in 1888, no blood-group work that could individualise a stranger, and no surviving crime-scene photography of the kind later readers expect.

Identity suspects accumulated anyway: local men, butchers, doctors, Jews scapegoated in the “Leather Apron” scare, and later gentlemen invented by memoir. Macnaghten’s 1894 memo, written to knock down a newspaper claim about Thomas Cutbush, named Montague John Druitt, “Kosminski” and Michael Ostrog as likelier than Cutbush — not as proven killers.

“Jack the Ripper” entered English from a letter to the Central News Agency, published in late September 1888, signed with that name. A mid-October “From Hell” letter to George Lusk of the Vigilance Committee is a second famous document. Police and later historians have long treated many of the hundreds of letters as hoaxes, including possible press hoaxes.