Jack The Ripper - Mark Whitehead [1]
And that’s the real reason that they remain ever present. It’s not outrage or grieving over the victims that really shift units or fill column inches. No matter how liberal we try to be, one word remains (and it’s not ‘monster’). The word is: Why?
There is a desire to understand what motivates such crimes. There has to be a reason, there just has to be. The detective approaches the subject by deductive reasoning, by using the grey cells – whodunnits tell us this is so.They must know the motive to know the killer. The killer gets an opportunity to tie up any loose ends before they are led away. The motives are always there in a nebulous form: power, sex, boredom, money.These are universal things that tie us to Them. But it’s never the Reason. That’s personal, the collision of countless moments in time, emotions, desires, beliefs and the indefinable. Something We could never understand.
And still we search.
There’s another name that might just ring a bell. He remains in our collective consciousness, subject to occa-sional tabloid outbursts. His victims’ lives have been chronicled exhaustively over the past hundred-odd years. The murderer’s many, many possible lives continue to be scrutinised. Each new discovery about him is greeted with heated discussion. All of it feeds our curiosity about The One That Never Got Caught. Jack the Ripper. It is the perfect name for a villain. It is probably too perfect. The letters that gave him his name are most likely hoaxes perpetrated by a journalist wanting to boost sales, but the name remains. We know the name before we ever know anything about the case. It’s as if we’ve been born with that name in our heads, part of our common mythology. It’s all part of the trouble with Jack.
Jack, familiar name for John, a name of fairy tales and legends – Jack the Giant Killer, Jack and Jill, Jack-Be-Nimble... Jolly Jack Tar (well, the Ripper was often described as wearing a sailor’s hat). London, no stranger to crimes or legends, had already been visited by one malevolent Jack in the 1800s. Spring-Heeled Jack, a fire-breathing, metal-taloned monster capable of prodigious leaps, who attacked bewildered London suburb dwellers. His reign of terror from 1838 to around 1904 saw him enshrined in nursery folklore as a bogeyman and as a popular figure for the penny dreadfuls. Curiously, just as the new Jack moved into London, the old one was spotted in Liverpool.
The Ripper? Well, he certainly ripped up his victims, and several suspects were claimed to have threatened to rip up people. Late 19th-century slang already used the word to mean both ‘a first-rate man’ and ‘a person who behaves badly.’ So was the name meant as a clue? Or was it used because it sounded cool or frightening? That’s the trouble with Jack. Everything has been analysed to the nth degree, everyone knows too much and yet no one knows anything.
Each new theory pores over the same details, the same cold entrails, searching for meaning, for an identity to leap out. Princes are named, doctors, writers, sailors. A game of cherry stones would be an equally useful divining tool. The trouble with Jack is that we can only build up his appearance through other people’s perceptions and experiences. What he did to his victims and the mixed descriptions of the sightings of men with the victims are continually cited. Everything is coloured by press reports, the public’s reactions, the police’s inability to find so much as a trace of him and the memoirs and theories that paint many different pictures. Even by Hollywood. A man of medium build with a curled-up moustache and a sailor’s hat. A top-hatted, caped toff with a little black bag sweeping through a pea-souper. The devil himself. Jack shifts