ABSTRACT
The Whitechapel murders were a series of homicides that occurred in a relatively small section of London's East End. The victims were all commercial sex workers living in the back streets of Whitechapel (more specifically, Spitalfields). One victim fell in the jurisdiction of the City of London Police, and a small group of police officers were charged with the task of policing London's ‘square mile’. Thus, a different investigative team were tasked with working on this case. Consequently, the Eddowes murder was investigated separately from the murders of Nichols, Chapman, Stride and Kelly. Despite great efforts from both police forces, the offender remained unidentified. Indeed, the name ‘Jack the Ripper’ still excites a strong interest in the crimes over 100 years later. Walk into any high-street bookshop and the ‘True crime’ section will have a number of books on the subject, most of which offer an array of interesting suspects. These include: a depressed barrister, an insane hairdresser, an impressionist painter, a cotton broker, a ‘quack’, Queen Victoria's physician, a Russian secret agent and a Royal-Masonic conspiracy. This chapter avoids the ‘name game’ of providing yet another candidate as to the identity of Jack the Ripper, regardless of any particular merits that the candidate may have. Instead, it takes a different tack, focusing on the work of the police, set within the context of the complexity of managing critical incidents, including the pressures faced when investigating these types of high-profile crimes. The ‘Ripper’ case is, in many ways, particularly illustrative of key issues in critical incidents, combining as it does the involvement and scrutiny of the press, the complexity of multiple murders, contradictory and competing information, concerns around the worries of the local community and the information overload involved in the case. Thus, the chapter sets out the sequence of events from the senior investigators’ perspective, highlighting those issues that recur as themes throughout the rest of the book and that illustrate how concerns in detective work have remained relatively stable over the last 100 years.
