ORAL PRESENTATION: JACK THE RIPPER
Introduction:
Hello everybody, we are Eric Gavilà, Didac Magdaleno, Pablo Lallana and me, Jaume Jurado and we are going to do a presentation about Jack the Ripper.
We will talk about:
- The background of the time when Jack the Ripper appeared
- Methodology and how he used to kill
- Victims of Jack the Ripper
- Investigations and possible authors
- The different nicknames that Jack the Ripper had
-And to finish with we will talk about films related to that murderer
Background
Jack the Ripper was an unidentified serial killer active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. In both the criminal case files and contemporary journalistic accounts, the killer was called the Whitechapel Murderer and Leather Apron.
In the mid-19th century, Britain experienced an influx of Irish immigrants who swelled the populations of the major cities, including the East End of London. From 1882, Jewish refugees fleeing pogroms in Tsarist Russia and other areas of Eastern Europe emigrated into the same area. The parish of Whitechapel in London's East End became increasingly overcrowded, with the population increasing to approximately 80,000 inhabitants by 1888. Work and housing conditions worsened, and a significant economic underclass developed. Fifty-five percent of children born in the East End died before they were five years old. Robbery, violence, and alcohol dependency were commonplace, and the endemic poverty drove many women to prostitution to survive on a daily basis.
In October 1888, London's Metropolitan Police Service estimated that there were 62 brothels and 1,200 women working as prostitutes in Whitechapel, with approximately 8,500 people residing in the 233 common lodging-houses within Whitechapel every night, with the nightly price of a single bed being 4d and the cost of sleeping upon a "lean-to" ("Hang-over") rope stretched across the bedrooms of these houses being 2d for adults or children.
The economic problems in Whitechapel were accompanied by a steady rise in social tensions. Between 1886 and 1889, frequent demonstrations led to police intervention and public unrest, such as Bloody Sunday (1887). Anti-semitism, crime, nativism, racism, social disturbance, and severe deprivation influenced public perceptions that Whitechapel was a notorious den of immorality. Such perceptions were strengthened in the autumn of 1888 when the series of vicious and grotesque murders attributed to "Jack the Ripper" received unprecedented coverage in the media.
Victims
The victims of Jack the Ripper weren’t rich or of an important social status, they were poor women who worked in the business of prostitution. The large number of attacks against women in the East End during this time adds uncertainty to how many victims were murdered by the same individual. Eleven separate murders, stretching from 3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891, were included in a London Metropolitan Police Service investigation and were known collectively in the police docket as the "Whitechapel murders". There are vastly different opinions and arguments on why these murders should be linked to the same culprit, but five of the eleven Whitechapel murders, known as the "canonical five", are widely believed to be the work of Jack the Ripper because of the way they died being so similar.
Each of the canonical five murders was perpetrated at night, on or close to a weekend, either at the end of a month or a week (or so) after.
Historically, the belief these five canonical murders were committed by the same perpetrator is derived from contemporary documents which link them together to the exclusion of others. In 1894, Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police Service and Head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), wrote a report that stated: "the Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims—& 5 victims only". Similarly, the canonical five victims were linked together in a letter written by police surgeon Thomas Bond to Robert Anderson, head of the London CID, on 10 November 1888.
Some researchers have postulated that some of the murders were undoubtedly the work of a single killer, but an unknown larger number of killers acting independently were responsible for the other crimes. Authors Stewart P. Evans and Donald Rumbelow argue that the canonical five is a "Ripper myth" and that three cases (Nichols, Chapman, and Eddowes) can be definitely linked to the same perpetrator, but that less certainty exists as to whether Stride and Kelly were also murdered by the same individual. Conversely, others suppose that the six murders between Tabram and Kelly were the work of a single killer. Dr Percy Clark, assistant to the examining pathologist George Bagster Phillips, linked only three of the murders and thought that the others were perpetrated by "weak-minded individuals... induced to emulate the crime". Macnaghten did not join the police force until the year after the murders, and his memorandum contains serious factual errors about possible suspects.
Methodology (Modus operandi):
Jack the Ripper is a very famous murderer and due to how the bodies of the victims were found we can say that he or they was a very cruel person and a psychopath. I said they because we still don’t know if the murders were done by one person or by more than one.
Jack the Ripper's modus operandi was characterized by cuts in the throat, mutilations in the genital and abdominal areas, removal of organs and disfigurement of the face of the victims.
The victims were all prostitute womens between 25 and 50 years old and with problems with alcohol, in other words, the victims were all womens that probably would not be missed.
He only killed in Whitechapel, which is a London Borough (there is a map of whitechapel and in red is indicated where the victims were found)
He used to murder between 1 and 6 am on the weeken, and always at the end of the month.
He killed the victims by strangling them or cutting the carotid artery with a knife, after that, he opened the abdominal cavity, also with a knife, and then he went on to the removal of some of his victims' organs.
The killer also used to leave the victims in very visible places and in some determined postures.
Jack the Ripper was a very intelligent organized assassin that was able to escape from the police and to trick the victims to take them into a secluded place and then to escape from a very guarded area, most of the times with a “trophy”
Nicknames
Apart from Jack the Ripper, a pseudonym that comes from the methodology he follows when murdering his victims, this assassin has other nicknames attributed to his person.
One of those nicknames is "The Whitechapel Murderer". This pseudonym comes from the location where he kills his victims, Whitechapel.
The other nickname of the murderer is "Leather Apron". This pseudonym comes from the police. They knew very little about the assassin, but they knew that he habitually wore a leather apron, so they called him like that.
Now, the name of " Jack the Ripper" doesn't mean that Jack is his real name. The pseudonym of "Jack the Ripper" originated in a letter, written by someone claiming to be the murderer, that was disseminated in the media.
Investigations and possible authors
The investigation consisted of a group of police who went house to house searching for evidence while the forensic material was analyzed. When a suspect was identified he was investigated and prosecuted or discarded. During the investigation, the police interviewed more than two thousand people, investigated approximately three hundred, and arrested eighty. Because of the incompetence of the police, a group of London citizens began patrolling the streets under the name of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee with the aim of finding suspects. Because of the kind of injuries, the police initially considered the butchers, surgeons and doctors as suspects but after investigating how they cut they were eliminated from the investigation. Some of the police suspects were: Montague John Druitt, Joseph Isenschmid Seweryn Kłosowski and Aaron Kosminski. However public opinion thought that he had to be an upper class man, probably a doctor or an aristocrat.
Films
So, after this explanation, now I will briefly mention 4 films the plots of which are about Jack The Ripper.
Hands of the Ripper is a 1971 British horror film. It talks about Jack the Ripper’s daughter, who witnesses the murder of her mother by her father. Fifteen years later, she seems to be possessed by the spirit of her late father, and she continues his murderous killing spree.
Now Murder by Decree and A Study in Terrror are two British mystery thriller films. Both of them talk about Sherlock Holmes and Jack the Ripper. In both of them, Sherlock tries to unravel the cases of the famous Whitechapel murderer. Personally, I like films in which detectives appear so I recommend them to anybody who is also interested in this genre.
Finally, The Lodger: A Story of the London Fog is a 1927 British silent thriller film. Although it’s pretty old, I think it’s an interesting film to watch, because I don’t think many people have seen any silent horror films. As the other films, its plot is also about Jack The ripper and his crimes.
So that’s it. Thank you for your attention.
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