Jack the Ripper — Five inquests in ten weeks · 32

Between 31 August and 9 November 1888, five adult women — Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly — were murdered in Whitechapel and Spitalfields. Later writers call them the “canonical five,” a grouping popularised by Sir Melville Macnaghten’s 1894 memorandum, which stated that the Whitechapel murderer had five victims and five only. A wider Metropolitan Police file on Whitechapel murders runs from 1888 into 1891 and was never closed by a conviction. 32 Suspect names in folklore are omitted here unless they appear in dated official paper. Keep Jack the Ripper with “Five inquests in ten weeks” and 30 from 1888. The CID officer English readers most often meet. He worked the ground in 1888 and later gave interviews that fed, but did not close, the suspect literature.

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.

In 1888, Jack the Ripper keeps 30 and “Five inquests in ten weeks.” Change the verb when the status changes. Keep Jack the Ripper with “Five inquests in ten weeks” and 30 from 1888. 301888

Figures to keep

Year in the file: 1888
Figure that fixes it: 30
Case: Jack the Ripper
Line that was public: Five inquests in ten weeks

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