A royal physician or a Masonic plot is the official solution.
No 1888 charging paper says so. Those stories are later fiction. Macnaghten’s named men were not princes.
Unsolved is not a licence to invent a king or a recipe.
Aftermath is historiography and tourism management.
Still open
- Identity — No name has met a criminal standard. Listing favourite suspects is not a result.
- How many victims — Five is Macnaghten’s figure. The wider 1888–91 Whitechapel list remains a historians’ argument.
- Which letters to keep — Dear Boss and From Hell are still individually debated; the rest of the pile is mostly discarded.
- What DNA can still do — Without a clean exhibit chain, new tests are likely to produce more press than proof.
- How to remember the women — Whether Whitechapel memorialises five adult lives or a killer’s brand is an open civic choice.
Myth vs record
DNA has solved the case.
A 2014 claim was disputed and never became a verdict. Status remains unsolved.
The killer’s name was Jack as a given name.
Jack the Ripper is a press signature. It is not a birth record.
The victims were nameless or not adults.
Inquests named adult women. This page uses those names and does not treat them as a chorus or as children.
Local notes
Victorian English
The 1888 press created the voice — lurid, civic, sometimes antisemitic — that later English still has to read against.
School and screen English
Pupils often meet a silhouette before they meet an inquest. Teachers who assign the case need a documents-first rule.
Tourism English
Today’s walk scripts are the living local dialect of the myth. They are sources about memory, not about 1888 identity.
Jack the Ripper remains an unsolved investigation whose English afterlife is larger, and louder, than its file.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.