Gimnazija Banja Luka

School year: 2013/14

Graduation work

Jack the Ripper in From hell

Teacher:
Student:
ana Hameevi
Tati

Milica

Contents

Introduction
.2

Major
suspects
.....4
From Hell:Royal
Conspiracy
..7

Conclusion
11
Bibliography
...12

Introduction

During the late 19th century, between 1888-1891, citizens of London were terrified by
one of the first serial killers in the world. His crimes were very unique and specific. All
of his victims were young women, actually female prostitutes who lived and worked in
the slums. Their throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations, and all of these
murders were committed in and around the Whitechapel district of London.

Since nobody could reveal his identity, he was named Jack the Ripper, due to his way
of killing. His identity remains a mystery even today. However, there are several
theories about who he really was.
Jack the Ripper has been an inspiration for many books and movies. One of the
movies I chose to discuss about the identity of this murderer, was From hell.

Major

Suspects

Before
specific
let's
what is
Jack the
forensic
and possible

looking at
suspects,
summarize
known about
Ripper from
surgeons

eyewitnesses. From the testimony of the various eyewitnesses which police took
most seriously, certain probabilities emerge about the killer.
1.He was a white male; 2.He was average or below average height; 3.He was
between 20 and 40 years of age in 1888; 4.He did not dress as laborer or indigent

poor; 5.He had lodgings in the East End; 6.He may have been foreigner; 7.He
was right-handed; 8.He was single so that he could roam streets at all hours.

Dr Thomas Neill Cream

Cream was a doctor secretly specializing in abortions. He was born in Scotland,
educated in London, active in Canada and later in Chicago, Illinois. In 1881 he was
found to be responsible for fatally poisoning several of his patients of both sexes.
Originally there was no suspicion of murder in these cases, but Cream himself
demanded an examination of the bodies, apparently an attempt to draw attention to
himself. Imprisoned in the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet, Illinois, he was released
on 31 July 1891, on good behaviour. Moving to London, he resumed killing and was
soon arrested. He was hanged on 15 November 1892. According to some sources, his
last words were reported as being I am Jack, interpreted to mean Jack the Ripper.
He was still imprisoned at the time of the Ripper murders, but some authors have
suggested that he could have bribed officials and left the prison before his official
release, or that he left a look-alike to serve the prison term in his place.

Aaron Kominski
Kominski was a member of Londons Polish Jewish population. He worked in London
as a hairdresser. He was certified insane and admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum
in February 1891. He was named as a suspect in Chief Constable Melville
Macnaghtens memoranda, which stated that there were strong reasons for suspecting
him, that he had a great hatred of women, with strong homicidal tendencies, and that
he strongly resembled the man seen by a City PC near Mitre Square. Aaron
Kosminski meets some of the criteria in the general profile of serial killers as outlined
by Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) criminal profiler John Douglas and Robert
Ressler.

Frederick Deeming

A sailor who suffered of, brain fever, and often noted as a cheat, Deemings murder of
his two wives and children were found by the owner of his house through the smell of
decomposition. Jailed in Perth in 1892, he told other inmates that he was Jack the
Ripper, but the fact that he was in South Africa at the time rules him out from being a
suspect, even if the style of murder was similar.

Robert D'Onston Stephenson

According to Ivor Edwards, Robert Donston Stevenson was Jack the Ripper. He was a
doctor, obsessed with the black magic. Edwards wrote a book called: Jack the Ripper,
Black Magic Rituals. In this book, Edwards explained his theory. He believes that the
Ripper planned his murders on the map of Whitechapel. However, historians and
psychiatrists are pretty skeptical about this theory. They say that these kinds of
murders are actually very rare.

Walter Sickert
The theory about Walter Sickert being Jack the Ripper is, for sure, one of the most
popular. Patricia Cornwell, the international best-selling author, in her famous book,
Portrait of a killer:Jack the Ripper-case closed states that Walter Sickert, a painter,
was Jack the Ripper. Sickert as born in Munich, Germany, and moved to London wit
his family as a little child. He would mostly paint butchered women, who look dead.
Sickert was very handsome, intelligent, socially accepted man. He wanted to be an
actor. He would often say: Keep the pretty women to yourselves, and give me the
ugly ones-the uglier, the better. Patricia thinks that Walter Sickert was a very educated
and modern man, who would read the newspapers regularly, and who was well
informed about the investigation, and the letters, that were allegedly sent by Jak the
Ripper to the police, confirm that. Patricia also believes that the serious medical

problems he had as a child caused some kind of a frustration. What makes this theory
even more interesting is that Sickerts handwriting, and the handwriting of the alleged
Jack the Ripper who sent letters to police, are identical.

From Hell: Royal Conspiracy

The theory that a royal conspiracy was behind the murders is a very popular one. Not
only is it the premise of the 2001 movie From Hell with Johnny Depp and Heather
Graham, it has spawned made-for-TV movies and documentaries and books.

Prince Albert Victor,

Duke of Clarence
This most appealing theory unfolds like this: Prince Albert Victor, known popularly as
Eddy, was the grandson of Queen Victoria and in direct line to the throne of England.
His father later became King Edward VII. Had Eddy outlived his father, he would have
become King of England.
Eddy frequently went slumming in the Whitechapel area. He met and had an affair with
a shop girl named Annie Crook, who he kept in an apartment there. Annie became
pregnant with his child and, according to one version of the story, married Eddy
secretly in a Roman Catholic wedding. Other versions have the child being born out of
wedlock.

Sir William Gull

Marrying or impregnating a Catholic girl of low social standing was a definite no-no for
a future king, and wind of this scandal got back to Grandma, who insisted on a
resolution to the problem. The prime minister delegated this task to Queen Victoria's
physician, Sir William Gull.
Dr. Gull had Annie taken away to a hospital where he savaged her memory and
intellect, leaving her institutionalized for the rest of her life. Mary Kelly was caring for
Annie's royal daughter, named Alice Margaret, when Annie was kidnapped. Mary Kelly
and her friends, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, and Elizabeth Stride, all knew about
the relationship between Annie Crook and the prince, as well as their infant daughter.
But they couldn't keep quiet and thus became a major liability to the Crown.
Again Dr. Gull was asked for his help, this time in permanently silencing Mary Kelly and
her friends. To explain the sudden demise of these troublesome prostitutes, Dr. Gull
cleverly created the persona of Jack the Ripper, a frenzied lust murderer with some
degree of medical expertise.
Gull's trusty coachman locates each of the friends of Mary Kelly and persuades them
individually to get into the coach. Dr. Gull then murders each woman, mutilates her in

increasingly savage ways and leaves her dead on the street. Mary and her dwindling
group of friends believe that a vicious gang that has threatened them in the past is
responsible for the murders. Dr. Gull saves Mary for last and subjects her to ghoulish
butchery.
One variation of the theory has Dr. Gull, whose intellect has been impaired by a stroke,
becoming a kind of Masonic ritual executioner. Not only does Gull go to great lengths
to create the belief that a concupiscent doctor has perpetrated the series of murders,
but he also weaves into that creation of some obscure ancient Masonic lore. Gull's
Masonic group, which is the virtual Who's Who of the London upper class, includes top
police officials like Sir Robert Anderson, who help Gull in his efforts to protect the
throne.
Everybody loves a conspiracy theory and without any doubt this one will endure for a
long time despite the fact that there is no evidence to support it and quite a lot of
reason to doubt that there is any truth to it at all.
There did exist a woman named Annie Crook who worked in a shop in Cleveland
Street, and she had an illegitimate daughter named Alice Margaret. But there is nothing
to connect her to a relationship with Eddy, whose sexual preferences were rumored to
be men rather than women. Homosexuality was against the law in Victorian England
and a man of Eddy's social standing would have to be very discreet if he were
homosexually inclined.
Cleveland Street was the home of a brothel that catered to wealthy homosexuals. The
brothel was raided, giving rise to strong rumors that Eddy was one of the patrons there,
but there is no existing evidence of his presence there at the time of the raid. Also,
there is nothing to connect Annie Crook to Mary Kelly, or to connect Mary Kelly to any
of the other victims of Jack the Ripper. There is no evidence to suggest that they even
knew each other at all and it is most unlikely that they were a tightly knit group of
friends, or at least it would have been discovered in the interviews that police had with
the families and friends of each victim.

Regarding Dr. Gull's ability to be Jack the Ripper, Donald Rumbelow in The Complete
Jack the Ripper points out:
Medically the slight stroke that Gull had in 1887 was the first attack of severe paralysis.
Although he recovered from it, its effects were serious enough to prohibit him from
further medical practice. Taken with the fact that he was 70 years old at this time, this
is surely enough to cast doubts on the story of his roaming about Whitechapel. Finally,
Gull did not die in a lunatic asylum. He died at home on 29 January 1890, after a third
stroke which left him speechless.
Also, there is nothing to suggest that the Ripper murders had anything whatsoever to
do with the Masons. Nor is it known whether Dr. Gull, Sir Robert Anderson or any of the
other high level police officials involved in the Ripper murders were even members of
the Freemasons.
Would the Crown have resorted to the flamboyant murder of five unfortunate women in
order to protect itself? Donald Rumbelow explains the Royal Marriages Act, which was
designed by George III to prevent his sons from marrying against his wishes:
"Under this Act, any such marriage as that between Eddy and Annie could have been
set aside as illegal, since (1) Eddy was under 25 years old at the time of the marriage;
and (2) he had married without the Queen's consent."
Finally, as John Douglas and Mark Olshaker state in The Cases That Haunt Us, the
frenzied butchery of the Ripper murders is the "work of a disorganized, paranoid
offender," not a person who "could continue functioning and interacting with people in a
relatively normal way. Dr. Gull simply does not fit this profile.
There are a number of variants to the Royal Conspiracy Theory. One has Eddy being
Jack the Ripper. Suffering from tertiary syphilis, he goes into murderous rages and
haunts the streets of Whitechapel in search of victims. That is, until his keepers catch
on to this and lock him up until his death from syphilis.
There is no supporting evidence for this variation either. Several years after the Ripper
murders in 1891, Eddy was named the Duke of Clarence, not a title that would have

been bestowed on a person that was violently insane from tertiary syphilis. While Eddy
did not possess a brilliant mind, he was always considered a nice person and was not
in any way inclined to violence.
While there were rumors about Eddy's sexual proclivities during his lifetime, there was
never any indication that police or anyone else at that time thought of him as a suspect
in the Ripper murders. Indeed, Eddy had pretty unshakeable alibis for all of the
murders, often being far from London when they occurred.

James Kenneth Stephen

Another variant on the Royal Conspiracy Theory was that Eddy's tutor at Cambridge,
James Kenneth Stephen, was Jack the Ripper: after Eddy ended a homosexual
relationship with his tutor, Stephen committed the murders for revenge.
While it was true that Stephen was Eddy's tutor, there is no evidence of a homosexual
relationship between them. A few years after Eddy left Cambridge, Stephen's brain was
seriously damaged in an accident and he eventually died in an asylum. The emotional
and mental problems that plagued Stephen after his accident gave rise to some violent
phrases in his poetry, but that certainly doesn't add up to being a serial killer. Like the
other variations of the Royal Conspiracy Theory, this one has no evidence to support it
either.
Variants of the Royal Conspiracy will continue to prosper because they lend
themselves to movies and books. They are dramatic stories that explain Jack the
Ripper in motives that we can all understand, unlike the frenzied evil that drives a
brutal serial killer.

Conclusion
In the end, From Hell straddles that fine line between fact and fiction so often found in
Hollywoods historical epics. There is no doubt that the theory about the royal
conspiracy is going to keep inspiring many writers to write books and make movies
about it, thats the reason why its so much popular.
To me, personally, I think that every other theory about the identity of Jack the Ripper
makes more sense than this one, but, this one is for sure one of the most interesting
ones.
I think that Patricia Cornwells theory is pretty interesting, and to me, makes sense,
which I can not say for the royal conspiracy theory. There is not really a single proof to
support this one.
On the other hand, we will hardly ever find out who this murderer really was. Maybe he
was some of the suspects I mentioned, maybe not. Maybe he was just a simple man
with a regular job and family in Whitechapel at that time, whose name has been
forgotten a long time ago

Bibliography

Primary source
1. Allen Hughes, Albert Hughes. From hell. 20th Century Fox. USA, 2001
Secondary sources
1. The Cases That Haunt Us

2. The Complete Jack the Ripper

3. Portrait of a killer:Jack the Ripper-case closed
4. Jack the Ripper, Black Magic Rituals
5. https://www.wikipedia.org/
6. http://www.casebook.org/