Inquest records
Inquiry
Coroners named the five adult women and recorded an unknown killer. Those names are the moral centre of the file.
Evidence quality is low by later forensic standards and only moderate even by 1888 standards.
What survives is good enough to write history and not good enough to name a defendant.
Exhibits
Metropolitan and City police papers
Archive
Beat reports, suspect interviews and inter-force notes. Incomplete survival is itself a fact of the archive.
“Dear Boss” letter
Letter
The September 1888 Central News letter that published the trade name. Often judged a possible hoax. It is a media exhibit, not a signature in blood that this page will dwell on.
Macnaghten memorandum, 1894
Document
The internal text that fixed five victims and three preferred names against a Cutbush scare. It is opinion inside the Yard, not a verdict.
Anderson and other memoirs
Testimony
Late official memory that names types of suspect. Useful as historiography; unsafe as identification.
2014 shawl DNA claim
Forensic
A modern test on an object with a broken provenance story. Disputed in the scientific and historical press; not adopted by any court.
How strong is the record?
Identity of the killer12
No charge, no consensus, no court-accepted DNA.
Contemporary paper55
Inquests and some police files survive; much is missing or filtered by press.
Letter authenticity22
The naming letters are disputed; the mass of mail is discarded as hoax.
Press completeness80
The newspaper record of the scare is abundant and is a source about media, not about the murderer.
The strongest evidence in this case is evidence about how England wrote the case.
Public-record encyclopedia. Not legal advice. Not a how-to. Graphic detail is withheld. Wars belong in a separate atlas.