Book claims Jack the Ripper was a newspaper's bid for sales

Sales of the Star soared as people became fascinated with the murders and the publication of a letter signed 'Jack the Ripper'

LONDON // One of the world's most notorious serial killers did not really exist, according to the latest research. Jack the Ripper, who terrorised East London in the 1880s, was the invention of journalists involved in a newspaper circulation war, according to a book by Andrew Cook, a historian who spent a year researching the killings. In Jack the Ripper: Case Closed, to be published in the UK this month, Mr Cook maintains that a letter taunting the police about the killings and signed Jack the Ripper was, in fact, penned by a reporter on the recently launched Star newspaper. Mr Cook claims that although the murders were real enough, they were unrelated and committed by several different people, only being linked together by journalists determined to create a fictional serial killer to sell newspapers. Although more than 200 non-fiction books plus countless novels have been written about the Ripper killings in the overcrowded, poverty-stricken streets of London's East End, this is the first to suggest that Jack did not actually exist. In the past more than 100 names have been suggested as the murderer, including Lewis Carroll, author of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Walter Rickert, the artist, the Duke of Clarence and Sir William Withey Gull, Queen Victoria's physician. Until now most historians have accepted that, among the many gruesome murders in the area at the time, Jack was responsible for the slayings of five prostitutes - known as the "canonical five" ­- in 1888. Mr Cook, however, has uncovered a hitherto unknown account of the murders by Percy Clark, a police surgeon in Whitechapel at the time of the carnage. More than 20 years after the killings, Clark was asked about the Ripper's five victims by a reporter on the East London Observer. "I think, perhaps, that one man was responsible for three of them. I would not like to say he did the others," he said. Mr Cook also cites an account by Thomas Arnold, one of the senior detectives involved in the case, in which he said on his retirement that he had never believed that Mary Kelly, one of the "canonical five", was a Ripper victim. The Star was the first newspaper to link three murders in Whitechapel to a serial killer and sales soared to 232,000 a day as London became gripped by a morbid fascination with the savage crimes, in which all of the victims had their throats slashed. Sales of the newspaper, however, fell off sharply when the Star wrongly identified a local boot maker as the killer. Within days a letter, starting "Dear Boss" and signed "Jack the Ripper", was published in the newspaper and sales took off again. Mr Cook enlisted the help of Elaine Quigley, a handwriting expert and the chairman of the British Institute of Graphologists, to support his claim that the "Dear Boss" letter was, in fact, written by Frederick Best, a journalist on the Star. The book says that the search for a lone killer enabled copycat murderers to get away with their crimes, as happened 80 years later with the Boston Strangler killings. But Mr Cook's book fails to overcome the report of Thomas Bond, a noted police surgeon who was asked to do a forensic review of the "Whitechapel murders", as the police called them, at the end of 1888 and whose work, according to contemporary scientists, stands the test of time. "All five murders no doubt were committed by the same hand," he reported. "In the first four, the throats appear to have been cut from left to right. In the last case, owing to the extensive mutilation, it is impossible to say in what direction the fatal cut was made, but arterial blood was found on the wall in splashes close to where the woman's head must have been lying. "All the circumstances surrounding the murders lead me to form the opinion that the women must have been lying down when murdered and in every case the throat was first cut." Meanwhile, more than 120 years after the last victim was laid to rest, Jack the Ripper continues to command space in newspaper columns around the world. Last month a row broke out in Australia when an academic proposed that the "real" Ripper, Frederick Bailey Deeming, fled London and settled in Melbourne, where he murdered his third wife. This has put a dent in Brisbane's claims to be the last resting of the Ripper, a convicted killer and con man known as Walter Thomas Porriott. The sad truth is that in all probability we will never know Jack the Ripper's identity. But expect the guesswork, informed or otherwise, to continue for many years to come. [e-mail]