Lucy Worsley Investigates

Lucy Worsley: On the 7th of October, 1888, London was in the middle of a media frenzy.

[Bell dings, hoof beats clopping] A tabloid newspaper had published a murder map.

It showed the locations where, just days earlier... several women had been brutally murdered.

Spectators flocked like tourists to London's East End to visit the killing sites.

True crime is now a modern-day obsession.

But how did the case of Jack the Ripper, back in 1888, set the template for this dark world of entertainment based on violence?

In this series, I'm re-investigating some of the most dramatic and brutal chapters in British history.

Oh, yes.

Here we go.

Man: And now you're face-to-face with William the Conqueror.

Woman: They know that sex sells and that violence sells.

Lucy: These stories form part of our national mythology.

They harbor mysteries that have intrigued us for centuries.

It turns very dark here.

Woman 2: Clearly showing us-- Lucy: Refugees.

They're such graphic images of religious violence.

But with the passage of time, we have new ways to unlock their secrets, using scientific advances and a modern perspective.

He was what we would now call a foreign fighter.

Lucy: I'm going to uncover forgotten witnesses.

I'm going to reexamine old evidence and follow new clues...

The human hand.

to get closer to the truth.

Man: It's like fake news.

Lucy: You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously as a piece of evidence?

In the autumn of 1888, it seemed everyone was talking about one story.

A murderer was on the loose in these streets in East London.

The killer had already targeted and butchered several women, and the press could not get enough of the story.

Here's that exact, same murder map from 1888.

We're talking about a serial killer.

Of course, we're talking about Jack the Ripper.

The entire nation-- in fact, the world-- was gripped by this unsolved case.

These murders are now more than 130 years old, and we're still obsessed.

I should make it clear that this isn't yet another search for the identity of Jack the Ripper.

Instead, I'd like to investigate how this case became the prototype for all the true-crime stories to follow.

I've come to the other side of London, to Kensington Palace, the childhood home of Queen Victoria.

This might seem like an unusual place to begin my investigation, but I've long studied Victoria's life, and there's some evidence in her personal diary I want to get my hands on.

This is a page of her diary from the 4th of October, 1888.

"Dreadful murders," she writes, "of unfortunate women of a bad class in London."

I wonder what she means by "unfortunate women of a bad class."

That sounds like a euphemism to me.

But the case was clearly on the Queen's mind.

Victoria even telegraphed her Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, with some strongly worded advice.

Her words were sent in code to prevent messengers reading the top secret information enclosed.

Here, the Queen is scribbling in her own writing what she wants the telegram to say.

"This new, most ghastly murder "shows the absolute necessity "for some very decided action.

All these courts"-- she means the little streets of Whitechapel-- "must be lit "and our detectives improved.

They are not what they should be."

And then she goes on to give the Prime Minister a telling-off.

"You promised," she said, "when the first murder happened, to consult with your colleagues."

But, she says, these things have not been done.

Queen Victoria is applying serious pressure on her Prime Minister to track down and capture the killer.

She was appalled by these heinous crimes.

But just how were these murders catapulted into the diary of a Queen?

Hi.

Can I come on?

Thank you.

[Air brakes hiss] From the 1860s, newspaper circulation expanded as more people learned to read and the tax on paper was abolished.

Fleet Street was where the nation's news was crafted and debated.

The top papers were all based here, and a new mass readership was born.

[Printing press clanking] The case of Jack the Ripper would begin with Mary Ann Nichols, also known as Polly, and she knew this vibrant newspaper world very well.

Her husband William got a job as a printer's machinist in Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street.

Just around the corner from Bouverie Street is the Church of Saint Bride's, the journalists' church, and it was here in 1864 that William Nichols and Mary Ann got married.

I've got here a copy of a page from the parish register.

Let's have a look.

Oh, here we go.

A marriage at Saint Bride's.

There's William Nichols, profession printer, and there's Mary Ann Walker.

It was her friends who called her Polly.

She was just 18 at the time of this wedding, and it's curious to think that William Nichols had no idea that one day his new wife was going to become part of perhaps the biggest story that these Fleet Street journalists would ever see.

Polly and William were married for 16 years, but after five children and accusations that William was having an affair, Polly walked out.

By 1888, she was scraping by on the streets of Whitechapel.

She would be brutally murdered there on the 31st of August.

Today, Polly Nichols is recognized as the first victim in this notorious case.

I think I can maybe get an insight into our true-crime obsession by tracking how the press portrayed Polly's death.

I've come to the British Library, which holds a massive newspaper archive.

Some of the police files from this case are missing.

In fact, some of them were stolen, which means that newspaper accounts are one of the key sources that I need to consult.

There's so much information here.

It's incredibly detailed, but there is a problem.

I am all too well aware that you can't always rely on journalists for balance and accuracy.

They're more than capable of spinning a story.

[Crank squeaking] This is the "Pall Mall Gazette" from the 31st of August.

That's the day that Polly was killed.

I think this is one of the very first mentions of her death, but she's not named.

There didn't seem anything particular about Polly's death at first.

See what happens in the paper the next day.

Oh, yes.

And here, she's actually named.

"Mary Ann, or Polly, Nicholls."

And they've dug a bit into her story, who she was.

And this is not without judgment.

It says here she was "the worse for drink."

This is "The Star" newspaper.

More sensationalist coverage, and they've called their article "The Whitechapel Horror" and they say, "These are the crimes of a man who must be a maniac."

By the 8th of September, there's a real sense of the story escalating.

It's made the front page of "The Illustrated Police News," and this is just extraordinary.

There's been a reconstruction visually of everything that's happened so far.

So here's the finding of the body.

We've got the, uh, the doctors in the mortuary, the inquest, and here is poor Polly, laid out dead in her coffin.

"The murdered woman at Whitechapel Mortuary."

It is incredibly distasteful.

[Scoffs] But this was a-- a really low-brow newspaper, and at the back, you'll find adverts for how to buy porn.

[Whooshing] Newspapers were now competing to provide the most lurid coverage they could.

And look.

We've got gory illustrations of Polly's injuries on the front page.

Blood and gore continue to characterize the true-crime genre today, but what drove the papers towards this sensationalism in 1888?

Media moguls had invested heavily in the new rotary presses.

These ones could churn out 10,000 newspapers in an hour.

But margins were tight in this business.

For anyone to make a profit, there had to be huge sales, so this meant that proprietors were after really splashy stories.

[Clanking] To discover the vital ingredients of a really splashy story, I've enlisted a former crime reporter who's very familiar with the business.

Lucy: Paul, why was it that the press got obsessed with this particular case?

The Ripper case had all the kind of classic elements of a salacious tabloid story, didn't it?

Because it had the element of sex to it, it was a whodunit, obviously, the murderer was on the loose.

There was the conspiracy-theory element to it, that it could have been somebody from the elite, and then you just got this whole sense of moral outrage that something so vile could take place in London.

Do you think it was quite new in the 1880s to read about this kind of story in the mainstream papers?

The mainstream seemed to be working off the back of the popularity of the shilling shockers and the penny dreadfuls, those salacious fictions that were sold for a penny on street corners.

And so they saw how popular they were, and crime started getting more into the mainstream press.

Mm.

That's a bit of a new development.

Now, as a crime reporter today, how do you know what's ethical to print?

Well, today, it's a lot easier because the press broadcasters, they have regulators, so they have rules to follow on accuracy, privacy, harassment, and things like that.

It's not the kind of wild west that it was in the 1800s, and they were just thinking about, "How can we generate more readers?"

It just seemed like a free for all if you look back on it.

I guess there was so much here that was novel and exciting and, in a horrible sort of a way, thrilling to Victorian readers.

It would have been thrilling.

It would have been shocking.

More people bought these newspapers when they led on these stories.

And then, if you fast-forward to now, look at the popularity of true crime, the true-crime genre.

There's still this sort of thirst for this kind of story.

Lucy: Here was one of the first unsolved cases to connect with a mass audience.

The Victorians already enjoyed mystery novels, and now this real-life case tapped into their fears about violence and kept the reader guessing.

Having talks to pull, it does seem significant that this almost "perfect" crime story came along at a time when the newspaper business was changing and expanding.

For the journalists involved, it must have been a really fast-moving, exciting world.

And just nine days after Polly was killed, the journalists had another murder to write about.

In 1869, Annie Chapman had married John, a coachman.

John's job meant that Annie had a comfortable life.

That's how they could afford to have this studio portrait taken.

But Annie's relationship would turn sour.

Caring for a disabled son and losing a 12-year-old daughter, Annie fell deep into alcoholism.

When John died, any support Annie had was gone.

[Flash powder whooshes] I think what I take away from the story of Annie is just how easy it was in Victorian London to fall far and fast.

In 1888, there was no safety net for women like Annie-- no financial support, only the workhouse, and that was so grim that many women preferred living on the street.

Annie was murdered in the early hours of the 8th of September, 1888.

Her body was found around 6 a.m. in a backyard in Hanbury Street, Whitechapel.

Rumors that these killings were linked intensified in September.

Here's the "Pall Mall Gazette" on the 8th.

They say, "Another murder" and "More to follow?"

They're basically hinting that there's a serial killer on the loose.

Polly and Annie's murders had troubling similarities.

Both women were murdered after midnight in the same part of the East End, and both had had their throats slashed.

I'd like to do some detective work of my own.

What seems to link Polly and Annie is Whitechapel.

Why do all roads lead here?

Whitechapel today is a vibrant, diverse area on the edge of London's financial district.

But according to the newspapers, at least, Victorian Whitechapel was a distinctly dangerous place.

Overcrowding was common.

Riots often happened.

People poured in, desperate for jobs, though, as Whitechapel was near to the factories and the docks.

We can safely assume that one of the reasons Polly and Annie came here was to look for work.

This is where Polly was living in the summer of 1888-- number 56, Flower and Dean Street-- and...this is where she was killed-- Buck's Row, that was called.

And Annie lived at Crossingham's Lodging House, which was at Number 35, Dorset Street, and her body was found in Hanbury Street, over here at number 29.

When you look at the map of Whitechapel like this, it's only a mile across.

There's something so intriguing about how such a small area of town managed to create such an enormous nationwide panic.

This archway is all that's left of Flower and Dean Street, where Polly was staying.

But don't be fooled by the street's floral name.

It was said it was too dicey for a single policeman to go in there on his own.

They had to patrol in pairs for protection.

The newspapers named Flower and Dean Street as the foulest and most dangerous street in London.

These sensational headlines about Whitechapel were meant to grab attention, but could mislead.

As a historian, I want to check them against other sources.

There's a set of groundbreaking maps which might give me an insight into the social conditions at the time.

Let's just unfold them here.

So these were done between 1886 and 1889, and the first section to be done was the East End, including Whitechapel.

[Gasps] Here we go.

Here we are.

According to Charles Booth, who created this map, he says, "I am sick "to death of novelists and journalists painting these very lurid pictures of life in the East End."

He says, "My work, my volumes are going "to strip it all back to sober facts and numbers and statistics and nothing else."

Who was Booth?

Can you tell me a bit about him?

Yes.

He was a very, very successful captain of industry.

He was an absolutely brilliant employer.

He ran the Booth Shipping Line, and he could not understand why there was so much unemployment in London and why all the charitable donations that are poured in for the unemployed just weren't hitting the target, so that's how his survey gets going.

They're really rather beautiful with all the different colors.

I think so.

Quite sophisticated for the 1880s, I have to say.

What do the colors mean?

Now, starting at the bottom, black is a very unusual designation for a work of social science.

Not only is it an indicator of chronic poverty, it also brings the angle of morality or character into it, which means "vicious, semi-criminal."

Here is Dorset Street, jet-black.

Oh, where's Flower and Dean Street?

They're here, and Thrall Street and Fashion Street.

That's another jet-black region.

Why do you think that the victims of Jack the Ripper were drawn to live in this Whitechapel area, particularly these black streets?

Mm.

All of these streets were filled with common lodging houses, and Whitechapel has more than any other district.

It is the place with the greatest concentration of this very cheap form of a roof over your head, and so it absolutely attracted people who were just, you know, financially not able to manage.

Would we call it a hostel today, do you think?

That's what I think.

People lived out on the street a lot more in the poorer parts of London because you didn't want to have to be indoors unless you had to.

So, when you're walking through it as a stranger, like Booth was, you're seeing life out on the street.

But of course, living your life out on the street like that also puts you at risk.

Absolutely right, which, of course, leads into the Ripper killings.

How do you think the people who lived in the yellow-- upper-, middle-, and upper-class areas-- how do you think they felt about the people who lived in the black areas?

I think a significant number of people in the upper-class streets headed east to do what would become known as slumming.

So, after a night at the opera, for example, or a splendid meal in a restaurant, they would hire their carriages and ask to be taken into the sort of very darkest heart of East-End poverty.

And we have quite a few anecdotal snippets from people saying that these tiny little streets and alleys ended up after hours being filled with the most intolerable people, braying and laughing in their sort of fantastic clothing, just treating the poor locals as they were--like they were animals to be looked at in a zoo or perhaps in the old days of Bedlam, when people went to laugh at the patients.

So that was deeply resented.

[Trotting hooves clopping] Lucy: It wasn't just the press whipping up the story.

Newspaper readers were also complicit.

Victorians wanted to experience London's underbelly for themselves and get a thrill out of its perceived dangers.

True crime in general gives us that same thrill.

[Horn honks] It's not just entertainment.

It explores our deepest fears and anxieties about society.

[Clock tower bell chimes, flash powder whooshes] [Siren wailing] By the 10th of September 1888, panic in London was rising.

There had been a marked escalation in the level of violence inflicted by the killer, and he was still on the loose.

Like had been done to Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman's throat had been cut.

It's horrible.

Also, her body had been disemboweled, and some of her organs were missing.

The police were struggling to make any progress with the case, but there was something new that they could draw upon for help--science.

As Annie's death was considered suspicious, a full autopsy was conducted.

The information from this autopsy was revealed in open court on the order of the coroner, Dr. Wynn Baxter.

Dr. Baxter was keen for transparency, but this meant the reporters put virtually every single salacious detail straight into the press, uncensored.

He was of the opinion "that the person who cut the deceased's throat "took hold of her by the chin, and then commenced the incision from left to right."

It's interesting about what was in her stomach, which was nothing.

She was hungry.

Poor lady.

It's so intriguing to see the authorities grappling with this new situation.

On the one hand, releasing so much medical information to people who weren't doctors would have increased the horror and the fear.

On the other hand, though, it also unleashed in the general public a fascination with this wonderful new world of forensic science as a means of potentially catching killers.

And that's something that's still with us to this day.

It's no surprise that the newspapers took full advantage of this openness from the authorities, and sales rocketed.

The Central News Agency in London began sending the story across the Atlantic via telegraph.

Reporters now swarmed into Whitechapel in search of new stories to feed the wires.

The press was starting to do something different.

They were not just reporting on the crimes themselves.

That was no longer enough.

By the 10th of September, the story was dominating the Victorian equivalent of 24-hour rolling news.

There were the morning, the evening, the Sunday editions of the papers to be filled.

The police hadn't made any official statements, but journalists rushed in to fill that vacuum.

They were now using Pitman's shorthand, invented earlier in the century, so they could very quickly take down the statements of any witnesses.

And they were competing to get scoops-- another new word of the 19th century.

The whole business had become a contest between the journalists to get their own exclusive angles and to put forward a convincing motive for the killings.

So if the journalists were desperate to suggest a motive for the crime, I think I should examine how they and the police combed over Polly and Annie's personal lives.

Could I have, uh, a pint of that one, please?

I don't just want to visit the places these women died, but also where they lived.

I've come to the Ten Bells Pub in Whitechapel, a place they used to visit.

I'm meeting the author of "The Five," a biography of the lives of the five victims, and an expert on historical sex work.

Hallie, what I've learnt so far is that Polly and Annie were vulnerable.

They had no fixed address.

they had addiction issues, but this isn't necessarily how society saw them at the time, is it?

Well, society saw them in a number of different ways.

I have here the police reports that were written up when the bodies of Polly, or Mary Ann Nichols, were found, and Annie Chapman.

And it's very interesting because the police officer who filled in this document, under the heading of professional calling, wrote the word "prostitute," OK?

There it is, in black and white.

Yes, absolutely.

Prostitute.

So why--why did the policeman who completed this form call her a prostitute?

You're questioning whether we can actually take that seriously as a piece of evidence, are you?

Well, a lot of assumptions were made-- [chuckles]-- at the time about what a dispossessed woman actually was.

It's a real sliding scale at this time.

If she was actually engaged in selling sex, if she was engaged in, you know, living with a man who was supporting her who she wasn't married to, you know, and Victorian society just liked to tar all of these women with the same brush.

They were all the same thing.

There was really no nuance applied.

I mean, and there is--this word, "prostitute" was used so loosely, including by people who claimed to be experts in it.

So, in the 1870s, somebody sort of published this supposedly authoritative treatise on prostitution in London and claimed there were 80,000 prostitutes in London.

But if you read it, if you go beyond that statistic, which gets repeated over and over again, you see that he included in that estimate any woman living out of wedlock with a man.

No way.

So, you know, that-- and that number then gets repeated by historians through time, saying, "This is how big the prostitution problem was in London," but it's taken totally out of context.

That's a very broad definition.

Right?

Ha ha ha!

Exactly.

It was impossible to tell who among the lodging-house community of women were prostitutes and who were just ordinary, poor women.

It was just so blurred.

Hallie, how was this issue probed in Polly's inquest?

Well, it's very interesting because-- and we have here Polly Nichols' inquest, and the coroner's court was very keen to put her under moral scrutiny, as if to blame her for her own murder.

And so they had her father, obviously, testify, and a number of questions were asked of him, and one of the questions was, "Was she fast?"

So was she immoral?

Well, did she run around with bad people?

And he said, "No, I never heard of anything of that sort."

But the coroner was really intent on kind of proving in some ways that she sort of got what she deserved.

Julia, do you think that Victorians were "keen" to think of these women as sex workers?

Because do you think that, in the Victorian mind, explains the crime that otherwise seemed motiveless?

Julia: In a way, yes.

In the 1880s, it's this moment when more and more women are on the street, and so the police and moralists are going, "Oh, how do we tell the difference, you know, how do we now know?"

We used to know, if you're on the street at a certain hour, that means you're a woman of ill repute.

Now that more and more women are coming to the West End for theater, for restaurants, for pleasure, these things that women weren't really allowed to do, those old rules don't apply anymore.

So we jumped right into the middle of this culture war about what prostitution means.

I think "culture war" is, you know, it's-- it wouldn't be a word they'd use, but I think it's a word that we could--yeah...

It certainly makes sense, yeah.

definitely apply to this moment.

Lucy: What started as a news story about two murders had become a story about moral outrage.

The press, taking their lead from the authorities, were all too keen to attach blame to the victims.

So it seems that all too quickly, Polly and Annie got reduced to this one little word of "prostitute."

And, sadly, I feel like this way of looking at women hasn't been left behind in the Victorian age.

From the 10th until the 29th of September 1888, there were few developments in the case.

Even in this age of sensational journalism, there was a limit to how long newspapers could spin things out.

The story was running out of steam.

It might have become just a footnote in history... but then everything changed.

On the 30th of September, 1888, what became known as the "Double Event" unfolded.

It involved a Swedish woman, Elizabeth Stride.

She'd been shunned for having an illegitimate child and wanted a fresh start.

But by 1888, Elizabeth found herself in Whitechapel and reliant on charity.

As an immigrant, Elizabeth had registered at the Swedish church, which today is here in Harcourt Street.

Now, the church often gave financial assistance to Swedish people in London who found themselves in need, and one of those people was Elizabeth Stride.

This is a record from the archives of the church of payments made, and it's for the third quarter of 1888.

Oh, yes.

Here she is.

"Stride, Elisabeth."

She's received... a shilling.

Ooh, and look at this.

Here's a coincidence.

A very strange one.

Down at the bottom, this page of the accounts has been signed off by the priest ten days later, on the 30th of September... and that was the very day Elizabeth was killed.

Elizabeth wasn't the only woman in danger that night.

Having left an abusive relationship, Catherine Eddowes found herself dependent on alcohol, and in and out of the pawn shop.

On the evening of the 30th of September, within the same hour and less than a mile apart, both Elizabeth and Catherine were killed.

Elizabeth Stride was last seen at 12: 45 a.m. in a narrow street called Dutfield's Yard.

She was murdered about 15 minutes later.

Catherine Eddowes was last seen at 1: 30 a.m., and her body was found just before 2:00.

It was under a mile from Elizabeth's in Mitre Square.

Four women had now been killed within a single month in the vicinity of Whitechapel.

Before the double murder of Elizabeth and Catherine could even reach the front page, something else shocking had taken place.

A letter, purporting to be from the killer, arrived at the offices at the Central News Agency.

This letter would be a turning point in the legacy of this story and the true-crime genre.

Now, this letter is such an important piece of evidence in this case, and I've got a really rare opportunity to see it.

Yes, the real thing, here at the National Archives.

This is one of the most famous letters in history.

[Gasps] Wow.

Lucy, voice-over: I'm showing this letter to a criminologist who works with violent offenders.

Is he convinced that this letter is really from the pen of the killer?

"Dear Boss, "I keep on hearing the police have caught me, "but they won't fix me just yet.

"I have laughed where they look so clever "and talk about being on the right track.

"I am down on whores and I shan't quit ripping them till I do get buckled."

Hang on.

That's so powerful.

"I am down-- I am down on whores," he says.

What the writer's doing here is giving us something that this case did not have, which is a motive: "I'm down on whores."

In my own work, one of the things that people ask all the time: "Why did they do it?"

That the assumption is that the individual had some issue with prostitutes.

"My knife's so nice and sharp "I want to get to work right away if I get a chance.

Good luck.

Yours truly..." [Scoffs] "Jack the Ripper."

"Jack the Ripper."

The first time in history those words appear.

Yup, he wants to say, "Yeah, "I'm probably walking around you, I'm there."

Yes.

"You can see me all the time."

Yeah.

But actually, nobody knew who he was.

What do you think the significance of the red ink is, Martin?

It's quite simple.

It becomes symbolic of blood.

There's a line here.

It says, uh, "I saved some of the proper red stuff in a ginger beer bottle."

That means the blood from the supposed killing.

Yeah, what--my thing is, if you mutilated someone in the way that the autopsy reports are, I'd like to know, how do you suddenly stop and scrape a lot of blood, or a vial of blood into--it says "a ginger beer bottle..." "to write with, but it went thick like glue and I can't use it."

Well, even if it was glutinous, if it was fairly--you'd still be able to write with it.

Depends on the implement you're using.

So you think this description of what the killer is supposed to have done, it doesn't stack up.

It doesn't ring true to you as something that would have really happened, putting blood into a ginger beer bottle with a plan to write a letter with it later?

In terms of my work, having worked with people who have done horrendous things, what tends to happen is when the crime happens, the emotional impact of witnessing what they've done has significant impact.

They don't satirize what they've done because if you really want to tell someone you've killed someone, you don't have to really go out of your way to write it in red...

True.

unless you're going to make a point with it.

Do you think it's a bit odd that they've sent it to the Central News office, rather than the police?

Of course I do, because you and I both know the moment you send a letter to a newspaper boss and they read it, they're just looking at sales.

So the moment you get this, you're thinking, "I can make a lot out of this," and then the police will start thinking, "Well, how come we didn't know about this first?"

That still happens to this day.

It's like fake news.

So whoever did this knew that they were going to generate publicity.

Hmm.

They knew.

You think the letter is basically a fake?

Writers are very, very good at fabricating the truth to make you believe it, and we're looking at this retrospectively, but I should imagine they could get away with it because there wasn't the forensic awareness to be able to prove it, because if they did, we wouldn't be sitting here talking about it now.

What are the repercussions?

This is a very, very clever way to fuel the kind of obsession with dangerous individuals.

We get caught up in "Who is it?

What did they look like?"

When we look at crime fiction, we love the bad person.

Actors love the bad person.

Everybody loves the bad person.

If you presented the reality about what victims went through, as a society, we'd have to respond differently to their act.

Whoever wrote it came up with this really potent brand of The Ripper.

It's impossible now for us to even think about a serial killer without thinking about Jack, and all that from a letter that was written by somebody who I believe had nothing to do with the actual deaths of Polly and Annie.

Today, most people agree that the Jack-the-Ripper letter is a hoax, sent by a Central News Agency journalist named by a former Scotland Yard detective as Tom Bulling.

But every time there's a serial killer on the loose, the name Ripper still gets trotted out.

So, between the 1st and the 4th of October, 1888, both the deaths of Elizabeth and Catherine and the letter purporting to be from Jack were reported in the papers.

The case was now notorious worldwide, and the manhunt for Jack the Ripper was now on, and anyone could join in.

Lots of these newspaper readers now turned armchair detectives, and they did the Victorian equivalent of wading into debates online.

They wrote in letters with suggestions about the case to the police and to the papers.

I've asked the National Archives to send me some examples so I can get an idea of where these armchair detectives were going to take the Ripper story next.

Here we go.

These are good.

Some people were trying to help and were well-intentioned.

This letter from Thomas Blair of Scotland-- [chuckles]--has what he thinks is a good plan.

He proposes that police officers "be selected "of short stature, "and as far as possible, "of effeminate appearance, but of known courage."

"And they are to be dressed as females "of the class from whom the victims are selected, "and sent out onto the streets at night to entrap the murderer."

Not sure that's a very sensible plan.

Then others were just malicious, kind of copycats, fearmongering.

There was one letter from somebody called "George at the High Rip Gang."

He said he was going to get to work in the West End, cutting up gilded ladies and duchesses, the posh women there, while his pal Jack continued his work in the East.

And here's a letter clearly intended to cause trouble and fear.

This person obviously knows about the "Dear Boss" letter.

They've written in the same red ink, and it begins, "Dear Sir, "I shall be in Whitechapel on the 20th "of this month-- And will begin some very delicate work."

"Yours till death, "Jack the Ripper.

Catch me if you can."

The public's investment in solving this crime mirrors the way that modern audiences engage with unsolved cases today.

But these self-appointed Sherlocks flooded the Victorian police with false leads and triggered public hysteria.

[Woman exhales] Lucy: By the end of October 1888, the newspapers were reporting that women traveling at night were half-mad with fear and carrying knives and guns.

A woman named Mary Jane Kelly, concerned about the murderer, offered up her home to the vulnerable sex workers she knew in Whitechapel.

Ten days later, she herself was murdered.

[Woman exhales] Lucy: Because of the victim's profile and the way she was killed, she's believed to be the final victim of Jack the Ripper.

[Woman exhales] Mary Jane's remains were discovered at 13 Miller's Court on the 9th of November, 1888.

She could only be identified by her ear and her eye.

Attention shifted to Shoreditch Town Hall, as it was announced as the location for Mary Jane's coroner's inquest.

Reporters were poised to revel once again in the hideous forensic evidence, but they would be disappointed.

I can see here from the transcripts that the new coroner, Dr. Macdonald, wasn't happy with having all the gory details of what had been done to Mary Jane revealed in the open court.

That was quite unlike his predecessor, Dr. Baxter.

It says here, "Dr. Macdonald's own opinion is "that it's very unnecessary to go through "the same evidence time after time.

He felt it ought to be discussed in a closed police court.

So this meant that unlike the inquest of Polly Nichols, which lasted for five days, the inquest into the body of Mary Jane Kelly only lasted for one.

After Mary Jane's funeral on the 19th of November, the police tried to stifle media coverage by withholding further details, but with the papers not getting what they wanted, some of them turned their attention on the police themselves, and the women of Whitechapel were getting desperate.

This article in the "Morning Post" perhaps explains why Queen Victoria knew so much about the case.

It's a report of a petition that's been sent to her by 4,000 women, and they have written, "Madam, "we, the women of East London, "feel horror at the dreadful sins that have been lately committed in our midst."

The newspapers' justification for their blood-and-guts approach to the Ripper story was that it would attract more readers, raise awareness, and generate change.

But did this approach actually work?

Lucy: Which cell do you fancy, Roz?

Roz: Ooh, I think maybe Cell 4.

OK. Looks like a good bet.

Lucy, voice-over: My cellmate for the day is the author of the book "Violent Victorians."

I hope she has the answer.

Roz, what did the journalists say that the detectives hadn't been doing or had been doing wrong?

Now, they were highly critical of the detectives and the way the whole investigation was run.

One paper in particular was the "Pall Mall Gazette"... Oh, yes.

which I have with me here.

"Police not available."

It says that the detectives are at fault, hopelessly at fault because... what's the explanation?

Yeah.

It just says that they're--they're useless.

"The comment of a Whitechapel costermonger, 'The police can't find nothink.'"

To be honest, they were doing all they could with the resources that were available to them.

What we've also got to remember is the police had a lot of interference, outside interference with their investigation.

Ah.

So, as well as the vigilante groups that were established, who'd roam around the East End, they also got thousands of letters from members of the public, people pretending to be Jack or giving them information.

They had to sift through all of those.

So one thing the journalists were doing was criticizing the police.

That filled up column inches.

What else was there?

So the newspapers at this time, they were already running this kind of critique of both the police and the investigation, as well as society.

It's because this is the era of New Journalism, and the idea of social reform in New Journalism is very, very important.

And I have this wonderful cartoon here from "Punch" to show you... that just sums it all up beautifully.

"The Nemesis of Neglect."

Neglect.

Yeah.

Gosh.

This figure is called Crime, and he's holding a knife and he is kind of saying Jack the Ripper is this--this specter of crime that's arisen from poverty-stricken, dirty conditions at the East End.

Jack the Ripper was representative of everything that was wrong with the East End of London.

Once the story of Jack the Ripper shines a searchlight onto Whitechapel, and all these middle-class people get concerned about conditions in the area, does anything change?

It does, Lucy.

There are a number of things that the reformers want as a result of the Jack the Ripper murders: they want better lighting, they also want more police supervision, they want more police patrolling, and finally, what they want, they want to get rid of those common lodging houses that they see as being the center of the slum, being where all of the misery and the problems of the East End emerge from, and so, to do that, they-- they suggest a program of slum clearance and in their place to build tenements.

Now, of course, the problem there is that the new tenements they build are not necessarily for the people who were using the lodging houses in Flower and Dean Street.

Slum clearance in the 19th century tends to just exacerbate overcrowding and slum conditions in other neighborhoods as people are pushed out.

Ah, so you build some fancy new buildings, and no one can afford the rent, so they go--where do they go?

Further east.

Lucy, voice-over: Exploring social justice is still a theme of true crime today.

We often justify the pleasure we take in the gory details by arguing that this has a higher purpose.

The Victorian Ripper coverage did draw attention to the harsh realities of life in the East End.

But none of our five women-- Polly, Annie, Elizabeth, Catherine, or Mary Jane-- would have qualified for the new social housing.

I believe the story of Jack the Ripper in 1888 set the template for a new kind of entertainment based on murder: how a crime story is constructed, commercialized, and then consumed.

All the ingredients are here: the unknown killer, the dark city, the fallen women, the forensics, the police failings.

But I've learnt that this isn't the truth.

It's a kind of dark media fantasy, and it concentrates our attention on the anti-hero of the story--the killer, at the expense of the humanity of his victims.