In the latter half of 1888, in the East End of London, five women were brutally murdered. Their bodies were subjected to varying degrees of mutilation and removal of body parts, including the uterus. These crimes appeared to have no motive, but exhibited a sexual element not previously seen, and were attributed to a single killer who became known as ‘Jack the Ripper’. The severity of the attacks, their location and the inability of the police to catch the killer led to both fascination and fear among the Victorian public.
Almost one hundred years later, another killer would invoke the same response in those living in the North of England. This murderer too would be given a similar nickname, the ‘Yorkshire Ripper’, so called because of his choice of victim. Most were prostitutes, like those of his predecessor. There were other parallels between the two cases - the media descriptions of the killers, the language and attitudes used towards the victims, and the reaction from individuals who wrote letters to the press and identified themselves as the killer in response to the media attention. The fascination with Jack the Ripper endures, primarily because he was never apprehended and his identity remains a mystery. Though the Yorkshire Ripper was caught, named and incarcerated, interest in Peter Sutcliffe would resurface whenever his name appeared in the news. To understand why the serial killer was the subject of so much fascination in the 1880s and again during the late twentieth century, it is necessary to look at the contemporary reactions to serial killer crimes and the wider social contexts of the periods in which they occurred. To evaluate such reactions and contexts, I’ve used newspaper articles from the 1880s, 1970s and early 1980s.
Termed ‘Outcast London’, the perception of the East End, for those who didn’t have to live there, was that it was ‘a symbol of decadence, immorality, criminality and poverty’. Of the 900,000 people who inhabited the East End, 76,000 of them lived in Whitechapel, the area where Jack the Ripper committed most of his murders. The West End, by contrast, traditionally associated with the wealthy, had been increasingly commercialised as a centre for department stores, offices, museums and tourism designed to attract women to shop there and also to work there. The East and West Ends of London were divided both geographically and, more importantly, socially.
Riots and violent demonstrations by the unemployed in 1886 had already given rise to fears over the unruly lower classes whilst increased immigration, particularly of large numbers of Jews into the East End, caused further overcrowding, worsened the already filthy living conditions and exacerbated racial anxieties. At the same time, social reformers, such as W.T. Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, published accounts of how members of the upper classes were using the East End as a playground for their sexual depravities causing a moral panic among London society. His highly successful article, The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon, resulted in a change to the law that raised the age of consent from thirteen to sixteen. These tensions, fed by the ‘New Journalism’ of the popular presses with their lurid accounts of scandals and crimes, resulted in both sides of the social divide blaming each other for the Whitechapel murders.
The newspapers quickly realised that to link the murders together into a continuous narrative in which they were carried out by a single killer would increase their sales and allow them to speculate on the details, playing on the fears of the public and increasing their fascination with the crimes. The lack of actual details about the perpetrator of these horrendous crimes allowed the press to project fears of the East End and its criminal masses, anti-Semitic feelings towards the Jewish community, and the idea that the working classes were there to provide entertainment for the wealthy, onto a single, shadowy figure who was responsible for all the ills of society.
These anxieties were condensed into three stereotypical images of Jack the Ripper—decadent lord, mad doctor and anarchic foreigner. The idea of the Ripper as a member of the upper classes was expressed in the newspapers, in letters to the police from members of the public and through characters in the literature of the time. Oscar Wilde’s ‘Dorian Gray’ and Robert Louis Stephenson’s ‘Dr Jekyll’ would have fit the image very well. Richard Mansfield, who played Dr Jekyll on stage, was accused of being Jack the Ripper because his transformation from respectable gentleman to murderous monster was so convincing.
The mad doctor theory arose from the mutilations that the Ripper performed on his victims, leading to speculation that they were revenge attacks for the contraction of a venereal disease, or that a crazed medical student was collecting body parts for anatomical study. In the absence of reliable eyewitness descriptions, a picture of ‘a generic male suspect—dark complexioned, black bearded, black coated, and “foreign looking”’ was enough to place suspicion on the Jews.
A further concern for the middle classes was that of prostitution, especially when it became a visible presence on the streets of the West End. Legislation, in the form of The Contagious Diseases Act, was designed to control the spread of venereal disease and targeted prostitutes specifically, but could be used to detain any woman regardless of status. The idea that these women had chosen to become prostitutes as opposed to being unfortunate women who had fallen on hard times with little choice but to become ‘streetwalkers’ elicited little sympathy for ‘Jack’s’ victims, who were all alleged prostitutes. However, fascination with the murders did not require sympathy for the victims.
Many of these contemporary fears and anxieties are evident in the newspaper article printed in the Evening News on October 1st, 1888. This report appeared the day after the infamous ‘double event’, so called because two women were murdered on the same night within a short space of time. The victims were Elizabeth Stride, who was known to have worked as a prostitute whereas Catherine Eddowes, who had just been released from a drunk and disorderly charge, appeared to be in a relationship with a man named John Kelly, who denied that Catherine was a prostitute.
The Evening News was founded in 1881 with a daily circulation of 10,000 copies. By the end of November 1888, the period covering the Whitechapel murders, the paper’s circulation had reached 219,000 copies. The paper had liberal leanings, but was affiliated with the Conservative Party; its content was in the ‘New Journalism’ style, attracting a middle-class readership.
All three theories as to the murderer’s identity, occupation or social status are included in this short article. Under the heading ‘The Whitechapel Horrors’, the murderer is first referred to as ‘The East End Fiend’. At this point the letter, sent to the Central News Agency and signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, had not been reported in the press. The victims are referred to as his ‘prey’, immediately ascribing bestial characteristics to the murderer. The reporter comments on the speed with which the murder was achieved and that ‘the deed was done in the time which the police surgeon said a medical expert would take to do it’, referring back to the theory that the murders were committed by a doctor or medical student. However, later in the article, this conclusion is refuted by asking a series of questions that invite answers from the reader: ‘Why should he want an indefinite number of specimens? Why should he want them at the end of each week?’ Following the double event, the press and police were inundated with letters suggesting how to catch the murderer and who he might be. There were even letters purporting to be from the murderer himself, which mocked the ideas that he was one of the Jewish lower classes or a doctor. Letters from the public are often used by the press to ‘shape or “orchestrate” public opinion’.
The Evening News also pursued a sexual motive for the murders. They surmised that, ‘the murderer be a maniac at once lustful and bloodthirsty’, with ‘Sexual insanity, […] the only intelligible motive of the murder’. It is not until the last paragraph that the victims are mentioned and then only to say that they are ‘of the same class’. They are not named and no details of their lives are given. The attractive appearance of the murderer and therefore the idea that he is of gentlemanly status is implied by the words ‘the assassin must appeal to [the women of Whitechapel] in some way that disarms suspicion’. The last lines arouse further fears of the criminal element of Whitechapel describing them as becoming angry at the lack of protection provided by the police and because no reward has been offered by the government for the capture of the murderer. The implication is that there could be riots, like those of two years previously, over the perceived lack of interest or sympathy for the lower classes by the authorities and wider public, increasing the anxieties of the upper classes.
Several papers, including the Evening News, kept their presses running twenty-four hours a day, allowing for the publication of several editions each day. In their fifth edition, the Evening News made it very clear that a single person was responsible for the murders. They were also more explicit about the nationality and social class of the man who had found Elizabeth Stride’s body, a Russian Jew named Diemschitz. Although some of the women are named, there are no further details of them, only that they are ‘unfortunates’. The wounds inflicted on them are described in quite horrific detail. Both letters naming the killer as ‘Jack the Ripper’ are published in this edition and from that moment on this is how he would come to be known. In the header of the article, the paper asks, ‘A HOMICIDAL MANIAC OR HEAVEN’S SCOURGE FOR PROSTITUTION?’
Given the moral panic over the growth of prostitution on the streets of London this would seem to be laying the blame for the murders on the women themselves and absolving ‘Jack’ from all responsibility, giving him divine authority to kill, and justifying hard feelings towards prostitutes.
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What becomes evident from these newspaper reports is the belief that not only are the police ineffectual at their jobs, but that the murderer’s actions seem to be taunting them — ‘the more energetic the police become in tracking him, the more contemptuously does he defy their efforts’, ‘he holds the fancied interruptions of the police patrol in contempt, and commits his murder, and hacks his victim’s body, almost within their sight and hearing’. By portraying the police as incompetent interest in their methods and the latest failures to catch the killer would increase.
The thirteen murders committed by the Yorkshire Ripper between October 1975 and January 1981 have many parallels with the Whitechapel murders of almost a century before. Many of his victims, though not all, were prostitutes, the locations in which he operated were the urban, industrialised, multi-cultural areas of Bradford, Leeds and Manchester, and these similarities led to the same types of questions and the same types of moral panic expressed by the public and in the media. The perception that these were sexually motivated crimes aimed at prostitutes resulted in calls for greater regulation and policing of red-light districts. The freedom of all women was seriously curtailed by harassment on the streets from men claiming to be the Ripper and other misogynistic attitudes. In addition, women were given conflicting advice that told them to seek protection from men whilst at the same time considering whether the men they knew and trusted could, in fact, be the Ripper himself. As in 1888, the police received letters and a recording from someone taunting them and claiming to be the Ripper, which they took seriously, but turned out to be a hoax. However, unlike his Victorian counterpart, the Yorkshire Ripper was eventually caught, named and put on trial.
The media coverage of the Yorkshire Ripper murderers worked in much the same way as it did in the 1880s, heightening the fear that women felt and adding to the fascination with the murderer and his motives. From the article that appeared in the Daily Express on Tuesday April 17th 1979, it is clear that judgements about the victims, based on class and status, were fuelling public opinion. Just as the Evening News had done before, the Daily Express described the Ripper as prowling in ‘seedy city areas’ like an animal. The paper printed pictures of two of his victims along with their names and ages, but stated that ‘Unlike the other victims, Jayne and Josephine were not prostitutes’, and it allowed the parents of Jayne McDonald to describe their daughter and make an emotional plea for the murderer to be caught. It is Mrs McDonald who remarks that the public’s attitude towards prostitutes and men’s reluctance to admit their own fears and fantasies surrounding their associations with prostitution were hampering the catching of the killer. Despite this, at the end of the article, the reason given for the McDonalds speaking out is that ‘the Ripper has struck, once again, at an innocent young girl’, separating those who were prostitutes and seemingly deserving of being attacked from those who were not. The prostitutes and their families are not given a voice. In the same article, an aside is made at the incompetence of the police team investigating the case and especially Assistant Chief Constable George Oldfield, the modern-day equivalent of Charles Warren who led the Whitechapel investigation.
After Sutcliffe’s arrest, fascination continued throughout his trial. Where Jack the Ripper’s mental state could never be determined, here was an opportunity to ask his namesake about his motivations and ascertain a diagnosis. Sutcliffe claimed that voices from God had told him to murder prostitutes, changing the focus of fascination from the mystery of who the killer was to whether or not he was sane or insane whilst committing the murders. Judith Walcowitz, comparing both killers in City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London, likens Sutcliffe’s ability to be both depraved killer and ordinary family man to a ‘true Jekyll and Hyde’ character. Before his arrest, Sutcliffe was portrayed as the ‘“male directed” fantasy’ of a ‘“nonspecific male killing force”’, but this changed when he was revealed to be an ordinary lorry driver. The media turned their attention to Sutcliffe’s background and the women in his life. Like the Victorian Ripper’s victims who had brought it on themselves by choosing their professions as prostitutes and creating a need for a ‘Heaven’s Scourge of Prostitution’, Sutcliffe’s prostitute victims also shared the responsibility for their own murders along with Sutcliffe’s wife and mother who had nagged him or upset him by having an affair.
Women in both the 1880s and the 1980s used the Ripper narratives and the interest it aroused to speak out about sexual danger and specifically about issues surrounding prostitution; both attempted to highlight the problems of sexual violence and misogyny whilst the media tried simultaneously to vilify them and keep them as helpless victims, whichever, it seems, suited their purpose and appealed to the masses at the time.
Both Jack the Ripper and the Yorkshire Ripper were given their names by the popular press. Tom Clark, in his essay ‘Jack’s back’: Toward a sociological understanding of serial killer nicknames, asserts that the serial killer nickname is a central part of the narrative that ‘often surpasses the individual’s formal name’ and is used by ‘various institutions to […] maintain particular interests’. The serial killer’s nickname gives them a ‘distinctiveness’ and identifies them as other and therefore deviant from the norm.
This works in the media’s favour, allowing them to attach any characteristics they choose to the killer’s possible identity, as seen in the three figures proposed as Jack the Ripper. Naming the killer increases the public’s fascination and can lead to greater awareness as well as increasing leads that may aid in their capture, but it also provides them with an air of mystery and achieves ‘an enduring appeal in the story’. The name attributed to Peter Sutcliffe placed him within a specific location. His nickname became a social and cultural resource used to construct a form of community. Therefore, anyone hearing the name, the Yorkshire Ripper, can place this killer within a particular framework of time and place, in this case Yorkshire in the 70s and 80s. As a result, women within the Yorkshire area experienced far more fear than women in other locations of the country. Above all, serial killer nicknames reinforce the fears and fantasies prevalent within the broader social contexts of the murders which contribute to people’s fascination with them.
On a side note, it appears that Peter Sutcliffe developed an early fascination with Jack the Ripper, regularly visiting a waxwork display of the Whitechapel murders and other gruesome anatomical effigies in his youth. L. Perry Curtis, Jr., author of Jack the Ripper and the London Press, believes that, no matter the differences in choice of weapon or the ways they were used, these images and Sutcliffe’s fascination with them and the Ripper of the past played a part in influencing his older self.
The wider social contexts surrounding periods of serial killer activity can reveal some of the reasons behind the fascination with these types of crime, whether they occurred in the nineteenth or the twentieth century. By playing on the contemporary fears and fantasies of the public, the media can escalate perceived anxieties to the level of moral panics. These, in turn, become the focus of fascination in serial killer cases, resulting in speculation on the identity and motives of the perpetrators of horrific crimes. Both the Jack the Ripper Whitechapel murders of the late Victorian period and the Yorkshire Ripper murders in the 1970s and 1980s exhibited similar anxieties that were revealed in the press, including class, race, and gender issues.
The areas of the narratives of serial killer crimes that remain untold or unknown, the stories of the victims, the truths never revealed in the killers’ motives or hidden beneath their untruths or, in the case of Jack the Ripper, the continued mystery of the killer’s identity, allow all kinds of fantasies and fears to fill in the gaps. This imaginative participation in the story, by the media and the public, perpetuates a fascination with serial killers that stems from a need to reassure ourselves that we are different from the killer, or worse, a realisation that we are in fact the same.
Primary Sources
Stead, W.T., ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babyon 1: The Report of Our Secret Commission’. The Pall Mall Gazette, 6 July 1885.
‘The Whitechapel Horrors’, Evening News, 1 October 1888.
‘The Whitechapel Horrors’, Evening News, Fifth Edition, 1 October 1888.
Newton, C., ‘How Many More Must Die?’, Daily Express, Tuesday 17 April 1979,
Secondary Sources
Buzwell, G., ‘‘Man is not truly one, but truly two’: duality in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’, British Library.
Clark, T., ‘‘Jack’s back’: Toward a sociological understanding of serial killer nicknames’.
Conference paper produced for ‘the Fourth Annual International Crime, Media, and Popular Culture Studies Conference, 17-19 Sept 2012, pp. 1-26.
Curtis, Jr., L. P., Jack the Ripper and the London Pres., New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Frayling, C., ‘The house that Jack built’, in A. Warwick & M. Ellis (eds.), Jack the Ripper: Media, Culture, History. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Haggard, R. F., ‘Jack the Ripper as the Threat of Outcast London’, Essays in History. 1993.
Jones, C., ‘Prostitution and the Contagious Diseases Act (1864, 1866 and 1869)’, HerStoria. 2012.
Oldridge, D., ‘Casting the spell of terror: the press and the early Whitechapel murders’, in A.Warwick & M. Ellis (eds.), Jack The Ripper: Media, Culture, Histor., Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007.
Simms, S. R., The History of the Evening News, 2006,
Walkowitz, J., City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London. London: Virago Press, 1992.