The UnXplained: Jack the Ripper's Unsolvable Killing Spree

London England July 1888 2 months before the horrific White Chapel Killing Spree began an American named Francis tumble arrived in the city although this was not his first trip to London for more than a decade templte had sold a number of medicinal remedies in both the United States and England and had also claimed to be a doctor and treated numerous patients in spite of the fact that he was not a licensed physician and had no formal medical training and there are those who believe that this dishonest self-proclaimed doctor was in fact Jack the Ripper Francis

tumble he was an American so-called Indian herb doctor in other words he basically was a quack who went around selling alleged remedies cure rolls and praying on the gullible and he was over in London during the time of the Ripper murders Tumbl he was horribly misogynistic it seems that early in his life he had uh married young found out later that the woman he married was a prostitute and had continued prostitution after they were married and so he would often espouse hatred toward all of womankind and especially the prostitutes he was a an unpleasant character

he used to host dinners at which his great party trick was to pass around anatomical specimens in glass jars of female body parts including uteruses and TL's name has been connected with the whole Ripper murders because he was a larger than life unsavory character as London was shaken by the first four Ripper murders investigators began to suspect that Francis tumbled could be the killer several of the medical examiners who looked at the mutilated bodies of the victims did comment that the killer seemed to possess some rudimentary medical knowledge and we know that tumble was known

in the states to have performed at least uh one abortion that went um fatally wrong and was wanted by the police in both the US and Canada for passing himself off as a fake doctor there is no doubt that the London Police viewed Francis tumble te as a key suspect they looked at his attitude towards women they looked at his desire to be taken seriously as a surgeon and his odd collection of uteruses and they believe that tumble te could have been Jack the Ripper according to London police records tumy was questioned about the Ripper

murders but he was ultimately released for lack of evidence then shortly after the Ripper's Fifth and final victim Mary Kelly was murdered Tumbl left London and returned to New York City some historians believe that the timing of these events is no coincidence when tumble first arrives um in London right after he gets there the Ripper murders begin and right after he leaves they stop while we don't know exactly where tumble te was or exactly what he was doing there was a woman who ran a lodging house at 202 baddy Street and that is about a

10-minute walk from each of the crime scenes she had a lodger and she referred to him as an American doctor there were rumors that she had found a bloody shirt after this lodger had returned late at night covered in Gore and then the lodger took up new residence at the chering cross Hotel the day after the last Ripper murder the lodger from the chering cross Hotel disappeared without paying his bill but left behind a small black doctor's bag once it was turned over to the police and the contents were examined ins side they found some

herbal medicines some clothing a little bit of jewelry and um some pornography which tumble te is known to have sold now it's hard to know for certain because this is just a theory but based on the timeline and the nature of this individual it is quite possible that he could have been involved in the Ripper murders the London Police may have had trouble proving that Francis tumble the so-called American doctor could have been Jack the Ripper but upon his return to the United States the Press had no such trouble convicting him in the court of

public opinion and many people came to believe that tumble was the real Ripper there was an interview with tamble that appeared in newspaper reports on the 29th of January 1889 the year after the murders when he's actually in interviewed by reporter who puts it to him that he's Jack the Ripper and his replies are very very interesting he claimed certainly recently stupid English police arresting him is because he's American and in his own words the killer wore a slouch hat according to descriptions and he said I wore a slight chat and so there's an accumulation

of what one might call circumstantial evidence with regard to to Tumble te is it possible that Francis tumble was Jack the Ripper many researchers believe the evidence is compelling and as proof they point to a curious object that was in T's possession when he died when tum died in 1903 he was in hospital run by nuns in St Louis and certain things were found on his person which included a plain Brass Ring almost like a curtain ring and the only Ripper victim who actually lost anything of a substantial nature was Annie Chapman and she'd had

such a ring a plain Brass Ring stolen off her finger by the killer so with regard to tber actually being Jack the Ripper for a lot of people now he's the favorite Ripper suspect London England August 1888 over the course of nine harrowing weeks the city was rocked by a series of horrific murders committed by an unknown killer the scene of these terrible crimes was a neighborhood of London known as White Chapel this one smallish area of the East End of London White Chapel was a magnet for not only the very poor people people who

had menial jobs for example but also the actually destitute the people who had reached the very bottom rung of the ladder who had nothing but the clothes they stood up in often and basically you had domestic violence theft and murder White Chapel was an area where you had a lot of homeless Drifters you had what we known as the common lodging houses and this is where The Drifters ended up it cost four P for a common lodging house you paid it to The Keeper of the lodging house and then you could get your bed fpin

sounds like a very small amount of money but if you had nothing at all it was quite something Society had very stringent rules about women earning or having money so many women turn to prostitution as a way to make NS meet in those days because there was literally nothing else for them to do if you look at White Chapel in the late 1800s you have women who would not normally engage in prostitution sometimes Hawking their bodies to make any kind of money just to get perhaps a bed for the night so these would be high-risk

victims under the cover of Darkness going with people they don't know into dark remote areas of Alleyways becomes highly dangerous for them very low risk for the offender it's a deadly combin ation for these women in the early morning hours of August 31st 1888 two delivery men were walking to work in White Chapel when they made a gruesome Discovery they found the body of 43 year old Maryann Nichols lying dead on the bloody pavement Mary and Nichols had been married had children but her marriage had fallen apart through alcoholism by the early 1880s she had

turned to sex work in order to earn her living when Maryann Nicholls body was found um at first it looked like a simple murder her skirts were up as though she was committing an act of prostitution at the time she was killed that's not particularly unusual for London in its day however when the body made its way to the coroner and further investigation was carried out they found that this was a murder and a mutilation and that raised some questions just 8 days after the murder of Maryann Nichols on September 8th 1888 the body of

another woman Annie Chapman was found lying in the court yard of a White Chapel tenement Annie Chapman had previously been married to uh a man named joh Chapman but they separated and eventually she found that he died she had tried selling items and and taking in crochet work that sort of thing to support herself but eventually she became more and more reliant on casual prostitution to get her money for that nightly bed when Annie Chapman's body was found there was no doubt that a horrible mutilation had taken place and now it made police begin to

wonder whether these two horrible acts one week apart in the same part of the city could well have been done by the same Twisted individual this is a killer who hated women and wanted to do maximum damage to them so it immediately gives off this sort of cinematic image of this Sinister character in a black coat going to the London Fog walking on cobblestones at night the notion that a predator was targeting sex workers in the White Chapel District set off a frenzy in the London newspapers there were 158 daily newspapers in London and they

were all in competition for sales so when the Press got a hold of this case of murders it was exactly what they needed for the new readership that they were trying to get you have to remember at the time these murders were taking place the Sherlock Holmes Mysteries were the bestselling thing on the planet and everybody wanted to sink their teeth into a nice juicy mystery unfortunately in the late 1800s we see a real effort from the media to let a cult of personality form and as much as we abhor violence and murder and killing

there are some ways in which the serial killer becomes this sort of folk hero of psychological Dev that terrifies and intrigues us it's a delicate balance to make sure we're not glorifying something that really shouldn't be glorified the media drove the horrific nature of the crimes in a sensationalist way White Chapel was obviously uh depths of degradation and poverty and yet it was literally two streets away from the uh the bank of England which was headquarters of the Empire at that time so that became very quickly a national issue and a national concern in the

aftermath of the two brutal murders the London Police were unable to identify a prime suspect as a result they chose to cast a wide net in their search for the killer more than 300 people were placed under investigation and 80 of them were brought in for questioning Chief Inspector Donald Swanson who was head of the investigation from Scotland Yard wrote a report at that time saying that the potential suspects range from the highest in the Land Queen Victoria's grandson um right down to East End butchers and slaughtermen there was no shortage of candidates there were

all sorts of people from Sir William Gull Queen Victoria's physician to her grandson Prince Albert Victor or somebody acting on his behalf even Joseph Merck The Elephant Man largely on the grounds that he lived at the London Hospital which was quite no White Chapel so there are vast numbers of candidates being put forward some laughable some quite plausible as the police scrambled to identify the man who murdered Maryann Nichols and Annie Chapman the vulnerable residents of White Chapel BRAC themselves for more attacks by the unnamed killer on the streets and corners of White Chapel the

reaction to the murders changed drastically with the discovery of the second victim and it led to the creation of watch groups patrolling the streets of East London poor women were on high alert vigilante groups formed in order to find out who this murderer was London England September 27th 1888 3 weeks after newspaper headlines announce the brutal murder of Jack the Ripper's second victim Annie Chapman the city remains gripped by fear as police investigators frantically Round Up possible suspects a mysterious letter arrives at London's Central news agency that appears to be from the killer himself it

is written in red ink riddled with spelling errors and strangely begins with the words dear boss the dear boss letter is addressed to the boss Central news office the city uh uh oh London city and it read dear boss I keep on hearing the police have CAU me but they won't fix me just yet I have laughed when they look so clever and talked about being on the right track I am down on and shant quit riing them till I do get buckled and it really became a big news story because of that line the

dear boss letter concluded with the words Yours Truly Jack the Ripper the boss letter is interesting because it is the first letter apparently having been written by Jack the Ripper where he gives himself a name communicating with the public this is not an unknown Phenomenon with serial killers because it makes them feel Superior as sort of this narcissistic view of them being so much smarter than law enforcement I can do what I want and you are not going to identify me the central news agency handed the dear boss letter over to police investigators who decided

not to release it to the public for fear of inciting even more Panic throughout London but then 2 days after the letter had been received on September 29th the Ripper struck again and this time he killed two women in a single night on the night of 29th of September 1888 two women were murdered in the same night within an hour of each other less than a mile apart Elizabeth stride was murdered in a yard on Burner street she was found lying on the ground with her throat cut but no mutilations and then half a mile

away within the hour Katherine edos was murdered in miter Square her throat was cut and she was terribly mutilated and the feeling is that the Ripper was interrupted in the killing of Elizabeth stride so he fled the scene but he's Lust For Blood wasn't seated so he sought another victim found Katherine OS and and killed her in MIT Square after Jack the Ripper claimed his third and fourth victims the police had no choice but to publish the deer boss letter in the desperate hope that the public could help them find the killer but unfortunately the

letter did little to solve the case instead it caused the fear across London to actually increase and ensured that Jack the Ripper's Infamous name would go down in history part of what made that letter horrifying is that it was understood to have been written and mailed before the murders were committed anticipating them when the murders occurred it thus for many confirmed that the Ripper manipulated the media in order to gain attention for his gruesome crimes but curiously not everyone's convinced that Jack the Ripper was the real author of the dear boss letter in fact some

believe that the letter was actually an invention of the media there was a very famous journalist at the time called George Sims and he used to write a column for a Sunday newspaper called the referee was called the mustard and Crest column and George Sims actually wrote in the column the following week that the dear boss letter was written by an enterprising London journalist and effectively his argument is when that letter was sent the hysteria in the media and the general fear of the White Chapel murderer had started to die down and there is a

theory that a newspaper man thought we need to get more sales so what better way to get sales we'll get a letter from the killer the boss letter was released by the police to the public now they were hoping that somebody might recognize the writing style or the or the handwriting itself but all it did was really complicate the investigation because then you had hundreds of people riding in in the same style as Jack the Ripper claiming to be Jack the Ripper claiming to know who Jack the Ripper was the dear boss letter encouraged readers

and people out there to send in their own letters sign Jack the Ripper most certainly from hoaxers people just looking to waste police time and every single letter no matter how ridiculously it seemed at face value had to be looked into by the police most of the letters sent to the police were dismissed as hoaxes but some experts believe that despite the skepticism the dear boss letter was in fact written by Jack the Ripper himself and as evidence they point to a passage in the letter detailing a trophy he would take from his next victim

the dear boss letter read next time I operate I shall clip the lady's ears off and send the police and consequently within 24 hours the police now found the horrifically mutilated body of Katherine edos and the Killer cut the earlobes as well do Katherine Edo's nicked earlobes prove that Jack the Ripper wrote the infamous dear boss letter more than 130 years after the letter was sent there's likely no way to be certain yet modern forensic experts studying the dear boss letter have used it to help develop a criminal profile of Jack the Ripper and it

paints an extraordinarily dark picture of the shadowy killer we know that there were almost no sightings of Jack the Ripper and even in the sightings that existed the descriptions are very vague so you're left with behavior he's organized and he's engaged in planing that requires a slightly older individual this is a guy who probably prefers to be by himself so his job would probably entail a job that where he can work by himself isolated could be a hospital worker could work in maybe a butcher shop or work as a mortician's assistant I think he lives

in the White Chapel area because he's very familiar with the routines of the police and that's why he's a successful killer London England November 9th 1888 as the city gathers for its annual Lord mayor's Day celebration the caretaker of a tenement in the White Chapel District peers through an apartment Window and makes a gruesome Discovery he finds the savagely mutilated body of Jack the Ripper's fifth victim 25-year-old sex worker Mary Jane Kelly when he looked through he found an absolutely horrific spectacle he saw a massive pile of blooded flesh lying on the bed on the

bedside table almost unrecognizable for Mary Kelly the murder of Mary Jane Kelly the last known Ripper victim it was different for some reasons from the others one is that Mary was the only full-time prostitute among the canonical victims the other is that it happened indoors she rented her own place although she was incredibly behind with the rent 29 Shillings that was a lot she was seen with a man actually shortly before she just disappeared forever into the house and this man came and tapped her on the shoulder and said something and they both laughed and

walked off and she obviously invited the man into her room but sadly there were no details about the man the murder of Mary Jane Kelly marked the first time that the London Police took photographs of a crime scene it was such a horrific attack that there was a new determination to catch Jack the river before he struck again the city was in an uproar they were calling the police incompetent that they couldn't catch this guy I I think one of the reasons that they took photographs actually at the scene is that they recognized there's some

Dynamic here we need to capture they were under a lot of pressure to solve these cases identify this individual I think anything that would help them to do that um was going to be in their best interest the use of crime scene Photography in Mar Kelly's murder investigation was an invaluable tool for a detectives trying to identify Jack the Ripper but why weren't pictures taken at the scene of the previous four murders well according to one Theory it could have been due to a conspiracy to conceal the Ripper's identity because he was potentially a member

of a powerful secret society known as the the Freemasons Freemasonry has its origins in England it's a secret society based on the enlightenment values of the liberal arts and sciences individuals who are masons they're not just this small group of guys who are sort of on the sidelines these are prominent individuals Freemasonry was rampant through the establishment of Victorian England there were Freemasons absolutely everywhere through the royal family through the Govern through the aristocracy through the church through local councils and in the police of course if Jack the Ripper had been a Freemason in particular

if he had been a member of an influential Lodge it's more than likely he would have been protected but what evidence is there to suggest that Jack the river was a Freemason some researchers point to a curious message left near the murder scene of Jack theer's for victim Catherine edos when the police were called to the horrendous discovery of Katherine Edo's body according to the description in police records on the wall Now by somebody had written the Jews are the men that will not be blamed for nothing but Jews are spelled j u w s

the spelling kind of summoned to mind jubila jubileum jubilo who were three legendary assassins in Masonic law according to Masonic ritual these three men jubilo jubila jubelum killed the Chief Architect of King Solomon's Temple in Jerusalem 3,000 years ago because of the city's wickedness and their murder of the Chief Architect is reenacted in Masonic rituals as part of the Master Mason ritual and so the spelling of Jews was the thing that really struck the police as a deliberate misspelling that's meant to mean something Central to Masonic belief could Jack the Ripper have scrolled the graffiti

message to let other Freemasons know that he was a member of their secret society it may sound farfetched but incredibly the actions of the lead investigator in the case suggest that this Theory could be true during the course of police investigation Charles Warren the London Police Chief took the controversial and rather odd decision to wipe the Graffiti Off the Wall now why did he do that maybe one of the reasons is that Charles Warren as a Freemason saw this on the wall and thought oh no no way am I having these murders in the East

End connected to Freemasonry and so he wiped that off the there's a lot of people who say the connection between Jack and the Masons was that the Masons orchestrated the murder of the prostitutes who were black men a member of the royal family Prince Albert Edward Victor whose Queen Victoria's grandson the air presumptive to the throne of England in a nutshell the theory is that Prince Alber Victor did frequent brothels uh and he had a child by a girl named Annie Elizabeth Crook and she told that particular group of prostitutes her Secret it and they

then s about blackening the RO family the speculation seems far-fetched but so the Jack the Ripper murderer unfolds during a Mania for what is called sluming when wealthy Elite people went to the precincts of the poor on a night out to enjoy themselves at dens of iniquity sights of prostitution and East London was famous for the dangerous proximity of both wealth and sexual exploitation according to the royal family conspiracy theory the Freemasons were then brought in to murder the prostitutes who were blackmailing the roal family consequently that's why police were made to erase the graffiti

to take away any suspicion from the Masons