The Ripper Code by Thomas Toughill

Author:Thomas Toughill
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780752487175
Publisher: The History Press
Published: 2012-04-18T04:00:00+00:00

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The purpose of this section is not to give an exhaustive account of all the published theories on the Ripper’s identity. It is instead to get straight to the heart of the matter and consider which suspects match the picture of the sort of man experience and common sense suggest the Ripper to have been, and which tally broadly with the conclusions reached in the section concerning evidence. That picture is summed up here as follows:

Jack the Ripper was male; he was a sex maniac who acted out of hatred for the female sex; he worked alone; he was, as George Hutchinson believed, in his thirties; he was an Englishman; and soon after the last murder he either committed suicide or was placed under some form of detention.

At a stroke then any theory of the ‘Jill the Ripper’ variety can be dismissed out of hand. True, there is no absolute physical proof that the Ripper was male; as far as is known, the doctors who inspected the Ripper’s victims found no semen or any sign that the women had had intercourse with the murderer. But why would a prostitute go to a secluded spot late at night with another woman? And it is simply too much to accept that a woman could inflict on a member of her own sex, or the other sex for that matter, the sort of injuries suffered by Mary Kelly. This is not to take a starry-eyed view of the so called gentler sex, but merely to record that while there have been many brutal female murderers, none have been known to mutilate a victim for the sake of mutilation. The drive to do this, it can be confidently stated, is the preserve of the male sex murderer.

The man who cut Mary Kelly to ribbons was clearly on the brink of obvious insanity and could not long have remained undetected in normal society. In any case, such was the murderer’s taste for blood at that stage, that he would not have stopped killing unless he was forced to do so. It follows then that any theory naming a suspect who lived as a free man for many years after 1888 must be treated with real scepticism. Many suspects fall at this hurdle, including Dr Roslyn D’Onston Stephenson, a colourful adventurer who lived a peaceful, if eccentric, existence until well into the twentieth century when he simply disappeared and Dr Tumblety, an American collector of female body parts, who did not die until 1903. Down too goes Walter Sickert, the painter, who lasted – almost incredibly – until 1942. Another casualty here is James Kelly who was incarcerated in Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum in 1883 for murdering his wife, and who escaped from that institution in early 1888. Kelly’s antecedents and his mental condition certainly make him an eligible candidate for the role of a serial killer. However, the problem here is that Kelly remained at large until 1927 when he returned to Broadmoor Asylum and gave himself up.

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