By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 6, 2026 · Updated May 6, 2026
Why Jack the Ripper’s Identity Is Still Open
Jack the Ripper is the unidentified killer of at least five women in Whitechapel, East London, between 31 August and 9 November 1888. Police never charged anyone. The principal suspects, including Aaron Kosminski, Montague Druitt, and Francis Tumblety, were named in internal Metropolitan Police documents that surfaced decades after the case went cold.
The Whitechapel murders are often treated as a parlor game with a missing piece. Match the right suspect to the right century-old document, and you have your answer. The archive does not work that way. Police files name three or four prime candidates and admit, in the same breath, that none of them was ever seen committing a crime. Witness statements contradict each other. A late DNA claim rests on a cloth with no chain of custody. The historian Hallie Rubenhold, in The Five (2019), reframed the case by asking who the women were before they were murdered, and the answer changed the shape of the question itself.
This piece moves through what the surviving evidence actually supports: the canonical-five framing, the contemporary police memoranda, the modern suspect literature, the contested 2019 DNA work, and the historiographical correction Rubenhold made within the broader landscape of historical and archaeological mysteries. The aim is to hold the case open accurately, because that is the shape it has always had.
The Canonical Five and Why That Frame Came to Dominate
The phrase “canonical five” is not a Victorian phrase. It comes from a Metropolitan Police document written six years after the murders, and it became orthodoxy only in the late twentieth century. The five women named in that document are Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly. Their deaths form the spine of every serious account of the case.
The Five Murders, Briefly
Mary Ann Nichols was found in Buck’s Row, Whitechapel, on 31 August 1888. Annie Chapman was killed at 29 Hanbury Street on 8 September. Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were murdered within an hour of each other on 30 September, an event sometimes called the “double event,” at Dutfield’s Yard and Mitre Square. Mary Jane Kelly was killed indoors at 13 Miller’s Court on 9 November, the most extensively mutilated of the canonical victims and the only one murdered in private quarters.
The Wider Whitechapel File
The Metropolitan Police docket labeled “Whitechapel Murders” included eleven killings between 3 April 1888 and 13 February 1891. Some investigators argued for additional victims like Martha Tabram or Frances Coles. Sir Melville Macnaghten (1853-1921), Assistant Chief Constable of the CID, wrote in his February 1894 memorandum that “the Whitechapel murderer had 5 victims & 5 victims only,” and that internal judgement gradually became the public frame, although it took until the 1960s for the memorandum to circulate widely, according to the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Hallie Rubenhold and the Reframing of the Victims
Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper, published by Doubleday in 2019, is the first full-length collective biography of the canonical-five victims. The book won the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction that year. Its argument is structural rather than forensic. Rubenhold spent years in workhouse registers, parish records, census returns, and Lambeth and Whitechapel inquest archives, reconstructing the women’s lives in their own right.
The Sex-Worker Assumption Tested Against the Archive
For more than a century, popular accounts described all five women as prostitutes. Rubenhold argues that the surviving evidence supports that label only for Mary Jane Kelly and, more equivocally, Elizabeth Stride. The other three, including Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman, were homeless or precariously housed women who had drifted out of marriages, lost children to disease or institutional care, and were sleeping rough in a district that had no shelter capacity. They were poor. They were not interchangeable with the Victorian moral category of the “fallen woman.”
What Changes When the Frame Shifts
The reframing does two things. It removes the rationalization that the killer was somehow “targeting” a sexual underclass, a frame that flattered both the killer and his readers. And it returns the women to the historical record as daughters, wives, sisters, and workers, not as plot points in a thriller. Rubenhold’s chapters on Nichols and Chapman use poor-law records to reconstruct decades of lived life before either woman ever entered a Ripper narrative. The lives are not reducible to the deaths.
What the Police Files Actually Say
The contemporary investigation produced three documents that drive almost every modern suspect theory. Each has a different evidentiary status and a different relationship to the public record. Reading them together shows where the investigation reached, and where it stopped.
The Macnaghten Memorandum (1894)
Sir Melville Macnaghten wrote his internal memorandum on 23 February 1894 to rebut a press claim that a man named Thomas Cutbush was the killer. The memorandum named three “more likely” suspects: Montague John Druitt, “Kosminski,” and Michael Ostrog. Macnaghten ranked Druitt highest, but his account of Druitt was wrong about basic facts, including the man’s age, which suggests he had not investigated the case thoroughly himself. The memorandum was never an indictment. It was an internal note ranking who the police would have preferred Cutbush to have been.
The Anderson and Swanson Notes
Sir Robert Anderson (1841-1918), Assistant Commissioner and head of the CID during much of the Whitechapel inquiry, wrote in his 1910 memoir The Lighter Side of My Official Life that the killer had been identified by “the only person who had ever had a good view of the murderer,” but that the witness, “being a Jew” himself, refused to testify against a fellow Jew. Anderson did not name the suspect in print. Chief Inspector Donald Swanson (1848-1924), who coordinated the investigation from Scotland Yard, later wrote handwritten marginal notes in his copy of Anderson’s memoir naming the suspect as “Kosminski” and adding that he died “shortly afterwards” in Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum. The chronology in Swanson’s note is partly wrong. Aaron Kosminski (1865-1919) was committed in 1891 and lived until 1919.
What These Documents Do Not Establish
Macnaghten admitted in his memorandum that “no-one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer.” Anderson claimed the opposite. The two senior CID officers contradicted each other on the foundational evidentiary question of whether a witness existed. The internal documents are useful for understanding what the Metropolitan Police thought it knew. They are not a charge sheet, and they cannot be read as one.
The Principal Historical Suspects
Modern Ripperology orbits a small constellation of suspects. Each has a documentary thread, and each thread frays under scrutiny. The strongest cases are not strong; they are the ones that survive the most scrutiny without collapsing.
Aaron Kosminski (1865-1919)
Kosminski was a Polish-Jewish hairdresser living with relatives in Whitechapel. He was committed to Colney Hatch in 1891, three years after the murders ended, and transferred to Leavesden Asylum in 1894. The case for him rests on the Swanson marginalia, the Anderson memoir, and the implicit endorsement in Macnaghten’s memorandum. The case against him is that the murders had already stopped before any restriction was placed on his movements, that asylum records describe him as docile rather than violent, and that he reportedly spoke primarily Yiddish, which complicates the assumption of a smooth approach to victims.
Montague John Druitt (1857-1888)
Druitt was a Dorset-born barrister and assistant schoolmaster at a Blackheath establishment. He drowned himself in the Thames in early December 1888, weeks after the Kelly murder. Macnaghten ranked him as the most likely suspect on the basis of family suspicion. Druitt was thirty-one at his death, not forty-one as Macnaghten wrote, and there is no documentary evidence linking him to Whitechapel on the murder dates. His suicide proximate to the cessation of the killings is the strongest circumstantial point in his file, and it is also the weakest, because correlation in time is not evidence of agency.
Francis Tumblety (c. 1833-1903)
Tumblety was an Irish-American quack doctor who sold patent remedies across North America and was in London during the autumn of 1888. He was arrested on 7 November 1888 on charges of gross indecency, fled bail to France, and returned to the United States. Inspector John Littlechild, in a 1913 letter, named him as “a likely suspect.” Tumblety’s value to the suspect literature lies in his timing and his collection of preserved anatomical specimens. The counter-argument is that his behavioral profile and physical description do not match the witness reports, and that no contemporary investigator placed him at any of the murder scenes.
James Maybrick (1838-1889)
Maybrick was a Liverpool cotton merchant whose name entered the Ripper canon only in 1992, when a diary surfaced that purported to confess to the murders. The diary was published in 1993 as The Diary of Jack the Ripper. In 1995 Michael Barrett, the man who had brought the diary to a literary agent, signed a sworn confession that he and his wife had forged it. Barrett later retracted the confession, and the diary’s authenticity has remained contested. Most serious historians treat the document as a probable hoax. Maybrick is included here as a study in how unreliable late evidence enters the canon and refuses to leave.
The Royal-Conspiracy Suspects
A separate strand of theory implicates the painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942), the royal physician Sir William Gull (1816-1890), and Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence. Patricia Cornwell, in Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper, Case Closed (2002), pressed the Sickert case using mtDNA from a Sickert letter and a Ripper letter, work that other scientists found unpersuasive. The Gull theory rests on a single 1970s claim by an artist named Joseph Sickert, since recanted, of a royal cover-up around an illegitimate child. Neither thread survives serious archival pressure, but both keep recurring because they answer a different need than evidence does.
The Eddowes Shawl and the Limits of Late DNA
In 2014, the businessman Russell Edwards published Naming Jack the Ripper, claiming that mtDNA testing of a silk shawl supposedly recovered from the Catherine Eddowes murder scene matched both Eddowes and Aaron Kosminski. The book reported the result without releasing the underlying methods. In 2019, Edwards’s collaborators Jari Louhelainen of Liverpool John Moores University and David Miller of the University of Leeds published a peer-reviewed paper in the Journal of Forensic Sciences that became the formal record of the claim.
Why the Shawl Cannot Close the Case
Three problems compound. The shawl has no documented chain of custody linking it to Mitre Square in 1888. It was reportedly taken by a police officer named Amos Simpson, but no Metropolitan Police inventory of Eddowes’s effects mentions it, and the textile itself has been variously dated to the early nineteenth century or to 1901-1910. Mitochondrial DNA, as the population geneticist Hansi Weissensteiner has noted, can exclude a suspect but cannot positively identify one, because thousands of unrelated people share any given mtDNA haplotype. And a published critique demonstrated that a key sequence variant the authors described as rare (314.1C) was a transcription error for the common variant 315.1C, which is present in roughly 99 percent of European populations. The Journal of Forensic Sciences later issued an expression of concern. Hallie Rubenhold’s response was characteristic: there is no historical evidence that this shawl was ever near Catherine Eddowes.
How the Case Stays Open
Three currents keep the Whitechapel question alive in serious historical work, and they pull in different directions. Each is doing useful work. None is going to produce a name.
Archival Reconstruction of the Victims
Rubenhold’s The Five opened a research path that other historians are now extending. Workhouse records, infirmary admissions, and parish registers can recover much of what was lost when the murders rewrote each woman’s biography around her last hours. Angela Buckley and other social historians have continued this work. The recovery is unfinished. The records are scattered across several London archives, and the women’s names appear under multiple spellings.
Critical Suspectology
Some scholars now treat the suspect literature itself as the object of study. Why does each generation produce the suspect it needs? The Edwardian press wanted a Polish Jew. The 1970s produced a royal conspiracy. The early twenty-first century produced a celebrity painter. Reading the suspect canon as a cultural archive does not solve the case, but it makes the case’s afterlife legible.
Forensic Conservatism
A third current treats new forensic claims with the skepticism the evidence usually requires. The Eddowes shawl episode hardened the field’s view that a 138-year-old textile cannot bear the weight of a positive identification, and that mtDNA is the wrong tool for the question. This is not a counsel of despair. It is the discipline of refusing to let a sensational claim displace a careful one.
What the Archive Will Hold and What It Will Not
The case will probably never close. Police files were thinned by wartime bombing and bureaucratic culling. The witness who, according to Anderson, identified the killer was never formally examined and may never have existed. The shawl will not bear another test the field would accept. The most honest position is the one Macnaghten implied in his own memorandum: police had suspects they considered “more likely” than others, and that is a different statement from saying they had a killer. Anyone naming a single name should be asked which document they are reading and what it actually contains.
Rubenhold’s correction stands as the most consequential single intervention in the modern study of the case. The women were not interchangeable. They had names, occupations, families, and decades of lived experience the murder narrative erased. To hold the question of the killer’s identity open accurately, an account has to begin with them.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who were the canonical five victims of Jack the Ripper?
The canonical five are Mary Ann Nichols (killed 31 August 1888), Annie Chapman (8 September), Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes (both 30 September, the so-called “double event”), and Mary Jane Kelly (9 November). The label comes from Sir Melville Macnaghten’s 1894 internal memorandum and entered general use after the document circulated widely from the 1960s onward.
Was Aaron Kosminski really Jack the Ripper?
Aaron Kosminski (1865-1919) was named as a suspect in three internal police documents: Macnaghten’s 1894 memorandum, Sir Robert Anderson’s 1910 memoir, and Donald Swanson’s marginal notes in his copy of Anderson’s book. The 2019 Eddowes-shawl DNA paper claimed to confirm him, but the shawl’s chain of custody is unverified and the mtDNA analysis was widely criticized. Most historians consider him a credible suspect, not a confirmed one.
What is the Macnaghten memorandum?
It is an internal note dated 23 February 1894, written by Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of the Metropolitan Police CID, to rebut a press theory that Thomas Cutbush was the killer. It named three “more likely” suspects: Montague Druitt, “Kosminski,” and Michael Ostrog. The memorandum was never a public document during the investigation and entered scholarly circulation only decades later.
What did Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five change?
Rubenhold’s 2019 book, which won the Baillie Gifford Prize, reconstructed the lives of the five victims using workhouse, parish, and inquest records. She argued that only two of the five were demonstrably sex workers, removing the long-standing assumption that the killer was targeting a sexual underclass and returning the women to history in their own right.
How reliable is the DNA evidence from the Eddowes shawl?
Not reliable as a positive identification. The shawl’s link to the 1888 crime scene is undocumented. Mitochondrial DNA can exclude a suspect but cannot positively identify one, and a peer critique showed that a key claimed-rare variant in the 2019 study was a transcription error for an extremely common European variant. The journal later issued an expression of concern.
Why are there so many Ripper suspects?
Because the case has thin direct evidence and a long cultural afterlife. New suspects appear roughly once a decade, often produced by the cultural anxieties of the period proposing them. Walter Sickert, Sir William Gull, Prince Albert Victor, and James Maybrick all entered the suspect canon long after the murders, often on documents the field considers forgeries or misreadings.
Did Jack the Ripper write any of the letters claiming responsibility?
Probably not. Police received hundreds of letters during and after the murders. Most are now considered hoaxes, including the “Dear Boss” letter that gave the killer the name “Jack the Ripper.” A minority of researchers argue that the “From Hell” letter, which arrived with a piece of human kidney, may be authentic, but the question is unresolved.
Where can I read the primary sources on the Ripper case?
The Metropolitan Police and Home Office files are held at The National Archives at Kew (MEPO and HO series). Inquest records are held in London Metropolitan Archives. Casebook.org and the National Archives’ digitized records make many primary documents accessible online. For social-historical context, Hallie Rubenhold’s The Five and Judith Walkowitz’s City of Dreadful Delight are the standard scholarly anchors.
