Assassin

He killed five women in ten weeks and was never identified, and a hundred and forty years later he is still not identified. That is the whole of the fame: not the crimes, which were squalid, but the failure. The largest manhunt in the history of the Metropolitan Police to that date. Two police forces working the same square mile. Vigilance committees patrolling at night, bloodhounds trialled in Regent's Park, over two thousand people interviewed, three hundred investigated, eighty detained. Hundreds of letters from people claiming to be him, one of which supplied the name the world still uses. Nothing. No arrest, no charge, no name. The case file was closed with the same information it started with.

The victims were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. They were poor women in Whitechapel who slept in common lodging houses at fourpence a night and went out after dark because they had not got the fourpence. Four of the five were killed in the open street or in a yard, in a district so densely populated that a scream should have brought twenty people. Nobody saw him arrive. Nobody saw him leave. In one instance he killed, was interrupted or thought he was, walked half a mile east into the neighbouring police jurisdiction, and killed again within the hour — two murders, two forces, one night. The medical men who examined the bodies argued over whether the man had anatomical training and never agreed. That argument is still running.

He worked because of where he chose. The East End in 1888 was the worst overcrowding in Britain: unlit courts, unpaved alleys, thousands of transient people with no fixed address and no reason to speak to the police, and a population so poor that the murders themselves became a national scandal chiefly because reporters finally went in and described the conditions. There was no fingerprinting yet. No forensic blood typing. No means of identifying a stranger who did not want to be identified. He required no disguise. In Whitechapel, an ordinary man walking at night was invisible by default.

Then it stopped. No confession, no deathbed statement, no reliable trace. Over the following century, more than a hundred people have been named as him: doctors, barbers, a painter, a member of the royal household, immigrants, madmen, and at least two men who happened to die conveniently soon afterwards. Every generation produces a new solution and none of them holds. The file remains open in the sense that it has never been closed by anyone who knew.

Forget the five nights and the manhunt and the century of theories. Remember only this: he stood in the middle of the most heavily watched square mile in England and nobody could tell him apart from anyone else — and that, not the knife, is what he actually was.