Those who say the Ripper case can never be solved are wrong.

[Azarna]

Build time machine. Go back to Whitechapel 1888, November 9th, 1am. Hide under Mary Kelly's bed.

Don't get me started on time dilation.

Would you want to risk peeking out whilst he was butchering her?

And if you did, would you recognize who he was? We have photos of a handful of the "regular suspects", but if he is someone else....

If I had a time machine I would go back to just after each murder and take photos of the body, plus some of the sites in proper daylight later on. Whilst it wouldn't immediately tell me "who dun it", it would be wonderful to then post here for everyone to pore over, theorize about and analyze. Far more fun than a simple "It was Mr X, case solved".

[Paddy]

Maybe beyond reasonable doubt

Hi All
As Anderson thought he knew and my great uncle Henry Cox seemed most were sure, is probably the best we can get with time.

Here is an instance where I should have saved my source, an idiot moment but was a news article. I shall search for it tomorrow !
It says Anderson said that the stains were what found the man he thought was Jack.
So I might go back and wait at Batty Street?

Pat.............

[Barnaby]

I appreciate the optimism, but the problem here is that some large portion of everyone's past is simply lost. Short of the time machine, there is simply no way of recovering it. For example, what did you eat for dinner on this day 15 years ago? Unless it was a special day, or you kept a detailed diary, this information is literally gone forever. You can make probability estimates (e.g., I eat pizza a lot), but you cannot know.

[J6123]

Hi All
As Anderson thought he knew and my great uncle Henry Cox seemed most were sure, is probably the best we can get with time.

Here is an instance where I should have saved my source, an idiot moment but was a news article. I shall search for it tomorrow !
It says Anderson said that the stains were what found the man he thought was Jack.
So I might go back and wait at Batty Street?

Pat.............

That is most interesting. The suspicion Anderson had towards this insane Polish Jew which led him to make his bold statements must have come from somewhere.

[pinkmoon]

And black Jelly Beans, please Black Jelly Beans for me and Steady.

Wrong they were gourmet jelly beans big difference we debated this sometime ago on the shawl thread just before it deteriorated into an absolute farce.

[Jonathan H]

That the case is a 'mystery' is arguably a total misconception, one most forcefully and enduringly launched in 1923 by William LeQueux.

It was solved.

Is this, or can this be an absolute solution?

No, but certainly a probable one (e.g. the chief suspect had already 'joined the majority').

A solution that was broadly (e.g. discreetly) shared with the public between 1898 and the death of George Sims in 1922:

Washington Post (Washington, D.C.)
4 June 1913
FATE OF JACK THE RIPPER

'Retiring British Official Says Once Famous Criminal Committed Suicide
London Cable to the New York Tribune
The fact that "Jack the Ripper", the man who terrorized the East End of London by the murder of seven women during 1888, committed suicide, is now confirmed by Sir Melville Macnaughten, head of the criminal investigation department of Scotland Yard, who retired on Saturday after 24 years' service.

Sir Melville says:

"It is one of the greatest regrets of my life that "Jack the Ripper" committed suicide six months before I joined the force.

That remarkable man was one of the most fascinating of criminals. Of course, he was a maniac, but I have a very clear idea as to who he was and how he committed suicide, but that, with other secrets, will never be revealed by me."

Confirmed the following year by the same police chief:

Sir Melville Macnaghten, "Days of My Years", Chapter IV.
LAYING THE GHOST OF JACK THE RIPPER.

'Although, as I shall endeavour to show in this chapter, the Whitechapel murderer, in all probability, put an end to himself soon after the Dorset Street affair in November i888, certain facts, pointing to this conclusion, were not in possession of the police till some years after I became a detective officer. ... The man, of course, was a sexual maniac, but such madness takes Protean forms ... I do not think that there was anything of religious mania about the real Simon Pure, nor do I believe that he had ever been detained in an asylum, nor lived in lodgings. I incline to the belief that the individual who held up London in terror resided with his own people ; that he absented himself from home at certain times, and that he committed suicide on or about the 10th of November 1888, after he had knocked out a Commissioner of Police and very nearly settled the hash of one of Her Majesty's principal Secretaries of State.'

And propagated in many articles by his friend and literary behemoth of two eras.

George Sims in "Pearson's Weekly", July 23rd 1915:

“With Neil [sic] Cream murder was a pastime. There was no question of the insanity of revenge upon a certain class of women as there was in the case of the mad doctor who lived with his people at Blackheath, and who, during his occasional absences from home committed the crime which won him worldwide infamy as Jack the Ripper.”

[Harry D]

If only we knew the circumstances behind Kosminski becoming a suspect. Anderson might have had it in his mind that the killer was a dangerous Jew, but clearly there was no shortage of them living in the East End (Levy, Cohen, Hyam Hyams etc.), what was it that made Kosminski stand above the rest?

[pinkmoon]

If only we knew the circumstances behind Kosminski becoming a suspect. Anderson might have had it in his mind that the killer was a dangerous Jew, but clearly there was no shortage of them living in the East End (Levy, Cohen, Hyam Hyams etc.), what was it that made Kosminski stand above the rest?

We do know he picked up a knife and threatend one of his relatives two years after the murders stopped so knife+local+loon made the police who were quite desperate looked at him.

[Jonathan H]

Yes I thought that would all be ignored.

In a sense it has to be, or else ...

There's only room in RipperLand for one police chief who claimed to be certain about his 'Jack'.

Sir Robert Anderson arguably believed that 'Kosminski' was driven to multiple murder by chronic masturbation, and that in early 1889 this madman had expired--in an asylum--due to exhaustion from such "unmentionable vices". No act of mayhem is too degrading and grotesque for a man in the grip of this sinful state.

By 1910 Anderson also believed that the same suspect had been positively identified by a witness (who, nonetheless, refused to testify due to sectarian loyalty) and that during said confrontation 'Jack' acknowledged by his demeanour that he knew he had been cornered.

[pinkmoon]

If Anderson had any real information about poor Kosminski we would know for a start they would have charged him with the crimes plus the poor witness who wouldn't testify because he didnt won't kosminskis death on his concience would have been hounded by the police.

[Jonathan H]

How could the suspect be charged if he was already permanently sectioned as a mental incompetent, and what is more the witness knew this--though having the confrontation [allegedly] happen at a police hospital on the coast may have been an attempt by the police to conceal this from said witness?

[Trevor Marriott]

How could the suspect be charged if he was already permanently sectioned as a mental incompetent, and what is more the witness knew this--though having the confrontation [allegedly] happen at a police hospital on the coast may have been an attempt by the police to conceal this from said witness?

The why didn't he go public and allay the fears of the public and simply say "we have now found and identified the killer, and he is securely locked away and will kill nor more" ? instead of gilding the lily with what he did write.

https://www.trevormarriott.co.uk

[PaulB]

How could the suspect be charged if he was already permanently sectioned as a mental incompetent, and what is more the witness knew this--though having the confrontation [allegedly] happen at a police hospital on the coast may have been an attempt by the police to conceal this from said witness?

IF the suspect was already committed to an asylum. A big IF.

[Jonathan H]

To Trevor and PaulB

In my own way I am going to defend Anderson.

I do not expect this interpretation of limited and contradictory data to please either of you, and that's fair enough.

In the very first extant version of Anderson's claim of a positive identification by a witness--the magazine version--the identification happened after the suspect was committed. Of course that might have been an error, one Anderson corrected for his book and/or verbally to Swanson (who wrote it down as an annotation).

Nevertheless I think Anderson only learned of 'Kosminski', in depth, in 1895 and sincerely believed that this was Jack the Ripper--a suspect who was now reportedly deceased by some years. At that moment the chief had also learned that the suspect's family had suspected the worst, but instead of doing their civic duty had lain low about the whole matter until finally having their member sectioned and thus placed beyond "Gentile Justice".

In fact, Anderson did immediately inform the public, via Major Griffiths as Alfred Aylmer, that the Terror was long over; that the best suspect had been committed to an asylum. For that matter, Swanson too seems to have briefed a reporter in 1895 that the likeliest suspect was deceased.

By 1910 Anderson's memory had begun to crumble (his mistaken claims about the Parnell imbroglio, strenuously denied by Monro, being yet another of several examples) and, I think after reading Sims' 1907 Ripper piece-- mentioning a critical witness who later confronted the Polish suspect--he mis-recalled and merged the strong suspicion of the Kosminski family with the Jewish witness who said no to Sadler in 1891 and yes to William Grant (also, not coincidentally, in 1895).

Hence the retired chief's somewhat rude dismissal of certain low-class, insular immigrants who would stoop to protecting a vile murderer because he was one of their own (in response Sims in 1910 chastised Anderson, very unfairly, by deploying the grossest anti-Semitic caricature of Jack, e.g. protected by Jewish financiers). I think that behind this muddle was originally in Anderson's mind only members of the suspect's family.

[dahler101]

Richard,
I admire and respect your thoughts! But sadly (and I do mean sadly) through lack of forensic links (more refering to the forensic methods at the time), evidence that has been destroyed in war time bombing, and the sheer amount of time that has passed, I find it very unlikely that we will ever truly find out the true identity of Jack the Ripper. Personally I find most of the "solved" theory's to be based primary on circumstantial evidence, although never without merit.

I do not believe however that Jack was as clever as he thought he was, more of a by-product of the time period. What I mean by this is that Jack got away with it mostly because the primary method for solving crimes in 1888 (from my understanding, I have been wrong before) was to ether have a viable witness or to catch the perpetrator in the act, and large amount of convictions would be based on circumstantial evidence rather then hard evidence.

With all that being said it is likley that Jack would be caught if he committed the murders today, sadly not before several women lost their lives.