La Historia de Charlotte (The Story of Charlotte)

Whitechapel murders

Whitechapel is a district in East London, 5 Km from the center, with a multiethnic population of Bengali predominance.

In the mid-19th century, an influx of Irish immigrants and Jewish refugees from Tsarist Russia and Eastern Europe led Whitechapel to overpopulation. Work and housing conditions worsened, and a significant underclass developed, characterized by poverty, crime, violence, alcoholism and prostitution. London’s Metropolitan Police Service estimated that there were 62 brothels and 1.200 prostitutes. Whitechapel suffered a nefarious reputation due to anti-Semitism, racism, delinquency and social disturbance. But its bad fame was not yet at its highest point…

Between summer and fall 1888 five women were murdered: Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. In less than 4 months. And, to the astonishment of Scotland Yard, all within a 1,5-Km radius. All of them were prostitutes. All of them showed the same modus operandi, characterized by deep throat slashes, abdominal and genital-area mutilations, removal of internal organs, and facial disfigurement.

He was not the first serial killer, but his crimes got an unprecedented media coverage and the press gave him the nickname of “Jack the Ripper”.

Between 1888 and 1891 six more murders occurred, with a different modus operandi (so the authorship was uncertain). Two of them before the “canonical five murders” and four of them after. All victims were women. All prostitutes. A total number of eleven.

This series of ghoulish murders was the last straw that broke the camel’s back. Nobody felt safe in Whitechapel anymore. Due to the lack of advances in the investigation, the very neighbors created the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, a group of volunteers to patrol the neighborhood.

During these facts, the Police and the press received numerous letters supposedly written by Jack the Ripper. The letter with the highest probability of being authentic was addressed to George Lusk, president of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee by then. It began with the words “From hell” and it came with a small box containing an ethanol jar with half of a kidney inside. In the text, the author said to have eaten the rest of the organ, fried.

More than 300 suspects were investigated by Scotland Yard. Any incriminating evidence was never found.

In 2014, the writer Russel Edwards affirmed to have compared, getting a 99% coincidence, the DNA from the vest of one of the victims with the DNA of one of the suspects, the Polish barber Aaron Kosminski. The latter was 23 years old when the murders happened and was interned in a mental asylum in 1891 because of “paranoid schizophrenia with auditory hallucinations and tendency to public masturbation” until he died in 1919. Shortly after, some researchers alleged that important mistakes were made during those tests.

Another investigation reported that the identity of Jack had been discovered thanks to a diary written between 1888 and 1889. In its pages, James Maybrick, a cotton merchant from Liverpool, confessed to have finished off five women in Whitechapel and another woman in Manchester, and concluded by unmasking himself as Jack the Ripper. Eventually, the diary turned out to be fake.

A whole universe has been built around the enigma of the Whitechapel killer. The neighborhood streets are nowadays a tourist attraction, with guided tours about the ghoulish happenings and a museum. The list of books inquiring into the case grows every year. Even a British collector paid 22.000 pounds (around 25.000 euros) in an auction for one of the supposed letters of the murderer.

Even today, the case of Jack the Ripper remains one of the biggest unsolved mysteries.