Jack the Ripper:The Faceless Crime

The Tenth Crime of Whitechapel. Engraving by Fortuné Méaulle published in 1891 in the Illustrated Journal • WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

London is at the end of the 19 ^th century the largest city in the western world. Capital of an empire on which the sun never sets, it embodies the omnipotence of Great Britain whose economy and diplomacy then dominate the planet. Queen Victoria, ascended to the throne in 1837, became Empress of India in 1876, is the living symbol of this supremacy, which nothing seems able to undermine. Yet it is there, in the working-class East End, near Whitechapel, that a series of atrocious crimes committed in 1888 against prostitutes will suddenly lift the veil on the dark underside of society. British.

In the East End slums

It all started at the end of the summer, on August 31, 1888, when we found in Buck's Row, a dark alley in this working-class district, the body of Mary Ann Nichols, known as Polly. This 43-year-old woman, who poverty had pushed into prostitution, was strangled, then had her throat slit, her abdomen slashed and her genitals lacerated. A week later, on September 8, in a backyard in the neighboring district of Spitalfields, the lifeless body of Annie Chapman was discovered:she had also been slaughtered and eviscerated. In addition, the vagina, uterus and bladder were removed by the murderer. At the end of September, two other victims were identified, also occasional prostitutes, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. The latter was horribly mutilated:organs were removed from the open belly and placed near the scarred face; a kidney was also severed and stolen by the murderer.

Working-class district, plagued by poverty and alcoholism, frequently engulfed by fog , the London fog, the East End was certainly not its first crimes. But these sordid murders arouse outrage and cause great concern throughout the British capital. The absence of theft, the way the bodies of the victims were cut and bruised, everything suggests the existence of one and the same assassin, with more than perverse motivations. But in the absence of traces or testimonies, the police are totally helpless. However, a few days before the murders of Elizabeth and Catherine, a letter had reached the British Press Center and had been passed on to investigators at Scotland Yard. She claimed responsibility for the first two assassinations and announced others. Written in red ink, it was signed "Jack the Ripper" , "Jack the Ripper".

While the crimes make the heyday of the popular press, which exploits their abominable nature without qualms, the investigation, it, tramples...

The case therefore turns into a real “moral panic”. The popular press, which has flourished since the middle of the 19 ^th century, knows the potential of miscellaneous facts. She therefore exploits without qualms this series of “sensational” crimes. The Star , an evening newspaper founded the same year, saw its sales increase from 20,000 to 200,000 daily copies, while The Illustrated Police News , the first of the magazines exclusively devoted to criminal cases, offers its readers a weekly summary and images of the ongoing investigation. But all the daily newspapers, from the Manchester Guardian at London Daily News and the Daily Telegraph , to the venerable Times , go there from their headlines. The impact also quickly spread beyond the country's borders. Above all, not content to add to the abomination of the murders, many reporters blow on the embers by criticizing a police force that is said to be incapable of protecting Londoners.

The investigation, it is true, is struggling to progress. She is first entrusted to Detective Edmund Reid, head of the municipal police of Whitechapel. But he was quickly assisted by investigators from the Central Office of Scotland Yard, led by Frederick Abberline, then by Charles Warren. During the months of September and October 1888, the police crisscrossed the slums and night shelters of the East End, distributed thousands of leaflets and calls for testimony, used bloodhounds and dogs. They question a total of nearly 2,000 people, examine the actions of more than 300 of them, including 76 butchers, renderers and similar professions. Over 80 suspects arrested, including John Pizer, a Jewish shoemaker from Whitechapel nicknamed "Leather Apron" (“ Leather apron”), a Polish immigrant suspected by the neighborhood. But neither he nor any of the other people arrested correspond to the murderer who, for lack of reliable testimony, it is impossible to identify.

Jews named for vindictiveness

In Whitechapel, frightened residents band together in a Vigilance Committee headed by George Lusk, a building contractor whom the neighborhood merchants have elected president. The committee, which organizes night patrols, does not hesitate to designate possible culprits for public vindictiveness, thus opening the hunt for the scapegoat. Many believe that such horrors could not have been committed by an Englishman. The immigrants who live in this poor neighborhood are therefore quickly denounced. Most numerous are the Jews, around 80,000, who have fled pogroms in Poland and Russia, and are struggling to survive in the slums of the East End. They are the ones who are accused from the outset. “Jews are those who will not be wrongly condemned,” denounces a graffiti on a wall in Goulton Street, not far from the streets where the bodies were discovered. The police, fearing a riot or outbursts in this neighborhood where anti-Semitism is virulent, immediately have it erased. Thousands of letters also arrive at Scotland Yard or in the editorial offices of the main newspapers. Some denounce a neighbor, offer the services of a graphologist or a medium, suggest a new mode of investigation.

This unprecedented investment testifies to the strong emotion aroused by the crimes, but it also speaks of the growing desire to participate in public affairs. Male suffrage has become general since the electoral reform of 1884, and democracy is progressing in this country long marked by very strong social deference. The matter becomes complicated, however, when other letters signed by the Ripper reach Lusk's committee. One of them, titled “From Hell” ("From Hell"), is accompanied by a fragment of right kidney. One thinks of course of the one that the murderer had taken from the body of Catherine Eddowes. But the writing differs profoundly from the first letter. Many think of the work of storytellers or reporters in need of copy. And if the said Jack the Ripper was only a stunt by the newspapers, the main beneficiaries of this public effervescence?

A terrifying autopsy report

But on November 9, after more than a month of silence, the assassin strikes again. At 13, Miller's Court, we discover the body of Mary Jane Kelly, also a prostitute, but much younger than the others - she is only 23 years old. Above all, she is the only one of the Ripper's victims to have been murdered between four walls, which left the killer all the time to refine his mutilations. The autopsy report, written by medical examiner Thomas Bond, is terrifying. The young woman was not only disembowelled; the face was slashed to the bone, the breasts were cut out, the skin of the thighs torn off, the abdomen incised and the organs scattered around the room. But Bond doesn't just examine the corpse, he hypothesizes about the personality of the "Whitechapel killer", thus offering the first psychological and sexual portrait of the killer.

Because there is no doubt for him that the same man is responsible for the five crimes:the same modus operandi , similar mutilations. However, Bond doubts that the assassin is a doctor; he thinks rather of a butcher or a knacker. His motives seem clear, however:the murderer is an ordinary man, a solitary individual and subject to "attacks of murderous and sexual mania". The expert had just invented one of the worst figures of modernity and one of its recurring nightmares:the serial killer , or serial killer, psychopathic murderer driven by sexual urges and engaged in a sinister game with society and the media.

Paranoia is spreading throughout society. The rumor imagines all sorts of culprits, and we even go so far as to suspect the grandson of Queen Victoria.

But, even as the portrait of the assassin begins to take shape, the series of crimes comes to a halt. The list of potential culprits goes on almost endlessly. We evoke pell-mell doctors like Thomas Cream, authentic assassin, but in prison in the United States at the time of the facts, Sir William Gull, the surgeon of the royal family, or John Williams, the gynecologist of Princess Beatrice. Other personalities are also suspected:Aaron Kosminski, a Polish Jew suffering from mental disorders, Montague John Druitt, a young man of good family, but with dissolute morals and whose body was found in the Thames at the end of December. , and even Prince Albert, Duke of Clarence and grandson of Queen Victoria. All are of course exculpated, but paranoia spread throughout society. The investigation lasted a few more years, during which the most fanciful hypotheses circulated (some even spoke of a gorilla escaping from the zoo), then was officially closed in 1892.

For Londoners, however, the page was not easy to turn. The Ripper had awakened the demons that had long plagued Victorian society. The British elites, driven by a deep sense of superiority, knew their fragile power and feared the violence lurking in the heart of the slums. In east London, along the Thames, stretched endless slums crammed with destitute workers, Irish and Jewish immigrants, the homeless and vagabonds. Famine and filth reigned there as mistresses; crime, alcoholism, prostitution were ordinary scourges there.

The reign of prostitution

In these desolate areas lived the cursed part of Victorian prosperity. Puritan England denounced a country populated by “criminal classes”, a modern Babylon dedicated to prostitution. The police spoke of 10,000 prostitutes, the newspapers of 100,000. But nothing was done to reduce the misery of these lost neighborhoods. In 1887, the year preceding the murders, Charles Booth, a pioneer of modern sociology, had nevertheless produced a map intended to help the public authorities to take the measure of the phenomenon. Breaking with the moral readings that had prevailed until then, he offered the first quantified material analysis of the dramatic living conditions in the East End, listed street by street, and for this purpose invented the notion of poverty line (" poverty line "). The atrocity of the Ripper crimes helped raise awareness in Britain and drew the attention of journalists, novelists and reformers to these forgotten territories.