My brother had arranged to take a Jack the Ripper tour with a friend, so I joined them for a night in stereotypical English weather. The guide was a Beefeater, who had a great knowledge of the city and a flair for story telling. He took us to each of the murder sites, described the environment and atmosphere as it would have been in the late 1800s and gave a summary background of each of the victims.
He threw in a conspiracy theory about the then King, the Freemasons and an illegal affair, but the real interest was the victims themselves. All prostitutes, they were generally in their forties because they weren’t attractive enough to work the centre of town. None of the murders was exactly the same, though there were clues to tie them all together. The key characteristics were placement of the arms and legs, the skirt rolled up to bare the pubic region and a double slit of the throat. The killer seemed to get more confident and more brutal with each killing until the last had her innards stomped into the dirt floor of her flat. Jack was almost caught one night when a passerby saw his feet when he first discovered the body. Jack left the mutilation incomplete and picked up another prostitute, who he proceded to butcher neatly in less than 14 minutes.
The surprise for me was that he stopped at five women. To have a reputation like he has, I assumed he’d murdered twenty people. The conspiracy theory explains this, and seems to be the only theory that explains all the other facts – as they were presented by the guide. But I guess we’ll never know.