Section E: investigative policing in Whitechapel in the context of the Ripper murders 

The 1888 murders 

1. On 31 August, Mary Ann Nichols was found in Buck’s Row 

2. On 8 September, Annie Chapman was found in Spitalfields 

3. On 30 September, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes were both found.  

4. On 9 November, Mary Jane Kelley was found, also in Spitalfields.  

5. Inspector Frank Abberline and his CID team were assigned to the murders, to help H Division.  

The problem of police and the media 

1. The task of the police was made much harder by more than 300 letters and postcards sent by men claiming to be the murderer. One letter, called the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, was reproduced in newspapers to try to gain information about the author. 

2. The press were also very critical of police methods, especially after the ‘double event’ (Stride and Eddowes’s murder on the same night).  

3. The press also made the investigation more difficult by publishing stories based on journalists’ guesswork and unreliable interviews with locals.  

4. With rising literacy and cheaper newspapers, huge numbers of cheap newspapers circulated, often with low journalistic standards (so-called ‘Penny dreadfuls’).  

The need for cooperation between police forces 

1. Solving this kind of crime needed cooperation between the Metropolitan Police, the City of London Police, and Scotland Yard, and this did not always happen.  

2. One example is when H Division police discovered an important clue on Goulston Street, inside the boundaries of the City of London Police’s area: an antisemitic message scrawled on a wall. Commissioner Warren, head of the Metropolitan police, ordered it to be washed off, possibly to stop the involvement of the City of London police.  

Developing police techniques as part of the Ripper investigation 

1. They used the evidence of post mortems: for example, a local doctor suggested that the cut marks on one of the victims indicated that the killer was left handed and had experience of dissection. This led the police to make enquiries at slaughter houses and hospitals.  

2. The police followed up leads from articles by investigative journalists, for example, a report in the Manchester Guardian that suggested the murdered could be a local man nicknamed ‘Leather Apron’. 

3. They followed up clues in the victims’ possession, such as a fragment of an enveloped found near Annie Chapman’s body that contained the seal of the Royal Sussex Regiment.  

4. They visited lunatic asylums, believing the murderer must be insane.  

5. They followed up coroners’ reports, such as Dr Wynne Baxter’s report who argued the murderer must have considerable anatomical skill.  

6. They interviewed key witnesses, such as Elizabeth Long, who claimed to have seen a man talking to Annie Chapman a few minutes before she was discovered dead.  

7. They set up soup kitchens, to encourage poor people to come forward by offering them a hot meal.  

8. As criticism mounted, they started conducting house-to-house searches and distributing 80,000 handbills.  

9. However, they had almost no scientific forensic techniques at their disposal.  

Lessons learnt and improvements to 1900 

1. The failure to catch the Ripper led to a review of police record-keeping, leading to the adoption of the Bertillion System in 1894. Measurements of suspects where taken, their mug shots taken, and records stored centrally. There is not much evidence of this helping CID catch criminals.  

2. There was also more awareness of the link between poor living conditions and crime. The Houses of the Working Class Act of 1890 started the process of replacing slums with mass low-cost housing.  

3. The Public Health Amendment Act of 1890 gave more powers to local councils to improve toilets, rubbish collection and other sanitary services.