Hoax letter signed by ‘Jack the Ripper’

Why this record matters

Date

9 October 1888

Catalogue reference

MEPO 3/142

In the autumn of 1888 a series of brutal murders was committed by a serial killer in the Whitechapel area of east London. The names of the victims were Mary Ann (Polly) Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly. Their killer was initially referred to as the Whitechapel Murderer, but is known better to history as Jack the Ripper. Despite a major police investigation at the time – involving many letters like this one, claiming to have been written by ‘Jack’ – the murderer was never caught.

Whitechapel was one of the most deprived areas of the country and the five victims were all living in poverty at the times of their deaths. It was a brutal place where violence was commonplace, particularly against women. In the months before and after these five women were killed, at least three other murders of women took place that were so violent that there has since been speculation that they may have been victims of the same person.

Victorian society expected that women would be supported, financially and socially by men – usually their fathers and then their husbands. It could be very hard for women who were single or separated from their husbands to earn a living, and this was particularly the case for working-class women. In Whitechapel, many such women lived a hand-to-mouth existence, struggling to earn enough money to rent tiny rooms, or to pay to spend the night in shared dormitories in doss houses.

None of the women murdered by the Ripper had a stable home at the time of her death, and none of them had a regular income. Many contemporary reports assumed that the women earned money through sex, despite limited evidence, and later historians have generally accepted this assumption. In fact, none of the women were known to the police as sex workers, and the witnesses who knew them attested to various casual jobs through which they earned money. Elizabeth Stride, for example, had been paid to clean the rooms in her lodging house, while Catherine Eddowes returned from hop picking in Kent shortly before she was murdered.

The five women had not always lived in such circumstances: all of them had at some time had steady jobs, some of them had been married, some of them had children. But all had faced major difficulties in their lives: some had struggled with alcohol addiction, some had been victims of domestic violence and other crimes. All were victims of a social and economic system where the odds were stacked against them. As a result they found themselves alone and vulnerable in Whitechapel in 1888, and became victims of an astonishingly violent criminal.

The murderer’s crimes caused a frenzy even in a society where violent crime was relatively commonplace. From the beginning, the focus of attention was on the murderer, with their victims sidelined and often stereotyped as ‘fallen’ women of the ‘unfortunate class’. There was enormous public interest in the crimes which mounted with each new death, and the police and newspapers received thousands of letters from members of the public about the case. Some of these were attempts to help, but many were written by hoaxers claiming to be the murderer. This letter is one among hundreds. It survives at The National Archives in the records of the Home Office, along with other letters and some records of the investigations carried out at the time.

Although some of these letters were taken seriously by police at the time, and indeed by researchers since, there is no strong evidence that any of them were written by the murderer. As with hoaxers today, the letter simply served to waste police time.