The Name of the Star - Maureen Johnson [65]
“Since the night, with the . . . with the Ripper . . . I’ve been . . . freaked out? A little?”
“That’s understandable,” he said, nodding. He was willing to try this out as an excuse for my behavior. I had to keep him talking about this topic—his favorite.
“Who is Jack the Ripper?” I said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“I mean, you read everything about Jack the Ripper—who is he? I think I’d feel better if I . . . understood what he was. What it was all about.”
He moved a millimeter or two closer.
“Well, I suppose the first thing is that Jack the Ripper is kind of a myth,” he said.
“How can he be a myth?”
“What’s known for sure is this: there was a string of murders in the Whitechapel area of London in the autumn of 1888. Someone was killing prostitutes, in more or less the same way. There were five murders that seemed to have the same signature—slash to the neck, mutilations to the body, and in some cases, removal and arrangement of the internal organs. So those are known as the Jack the Ripper murders, but some people think there were four murders, some six, some more than that. The best guess is that there were five victims, and that’s what the legend is built around. But that could be completely wrong. If you go to the Ten Bells Pub, for instance, they have a plaque on the wall commemorating six victims. So the facts of the whole thing are unclear, which is part of the reason it’s almost impossible to solve.”
“So this killer is following one version of the story?” I said.
“Right. He’s not even following a very nuanced version of the story. It’s pretty much the Wikipedia version or the version from the movies. The name. That’s another issue. Jack the Ripper never called himself Jack the Ripper. Just like now, there were dozens of hoaxes. Loads of people sent letters to the press claiming to be the murderer. Only about three of these letters were considered to be even possibly real—and now the general opinion is that they’re all fakes. One was the ‘From Hell’ letter, which is the one that James Goode got. Another was signed Jack the Ripper. That one was probably written by someone from the Star newspaper. The Star got famous because of Jack the Ripper. They took the stories of these murders and created one of the first media superstars. And they did a really good job, because here we are, over a hundred years later, still obsessed.”
“But there have been other murderers since,” I said. “Lots of them.”
“But Jack the Ripper was kind of the original. See, he was around when the police force was fairly new and psychology was just starting out. People understood why someone might kill to steal something, or out of anger, or out of jealousy. But here was a man killing for seemingly no reason at all, hunting down vulnerable, poor women, cutting them apart. There was no explanation. What made him so terrifying was that he didn’t need a reason. He just liked to kill. And the papers played the story up until people were mad with fear. He’s the first modern killer.”
“So who did it?” I asked. “They have to know.”
“No,” Jerome said, leaning back. “They don’t know. They never will know. The evidence is gone. The suspects and witnesses are long dead. The vast majority of the original Jack the Ripper case files are gone. Keeping records for the long term wasn’t considered that important back then. Things got thrown away. People took souvenirs. Papers got moved, lost. Lots of records were lost in the war. It’s exceedingly unlikely that we will ever find anything that conclusively identifies Jack the Ripper. But that won’t stop people from trying. They’ve been trying nonstop since 1888. It’s the one magic case that everyone wants to solve and no one can. Pretending to be Jack the Ripper is pretty much the scariest thing you could possibly do because he’s