Unsolved Mysteries

The Ripper! He's done it again!

The Ripper has done it again!

People have heard the name of Jack the Ripper

even if they don't know what Jack the Ripper did.

He was a terrible killer, Jack the Ripper. Yeah.

And he was never caught or punished.

-What a clever fellow. Yay. -

It happened in Victorian times in London,

but there are books about Jack the Ripper

written in Japanese, Chinese, Italian, and Spanish,

so the... the name's around everywhere.

Jack the Ripper!

Stop using that stupid name!

Jack has taken on a life of his own that's outside of what he actually did.

But when you realize the full horror of the crimes,

your perspective changes.

The crimes were horrendous.

He tried to cut her nose off, tried to cut an ear off,

put slashes and gashes all over.

He cuts out her heart.

It really does take your breath away.

If you think about it, the mystery's popular for several reasons.

Firstly, Jack the Ripper frightened people

in a way that no killer had ever done before,

and probably no killer's ever done since.

The other reason it's remained popular is it's an ever-evolving story.

It happened over 135 years ago,

and yet we're still trying to solve the mystery.

In the early hours of 31st August of 1888,

a policeman comes down his beat in Whitechapel.

Suddenly, he sees something lying in a gateway.

As he gets closer, he sees it's a woman lying on the ground.

He's got a lantern, so he shines the lantern onto her

and sees that her throat's been cut.

What he doesn't see is that, beneath her bloodstained clothing,

she's been disemboweled.

There were several people living in the area.

There was even people in the very house next to the gates in which she was found,

and they hear and see nothing.

It had obviously happened quietly

right under a window

where honest people were sleeping in their beds.

It was a very, very ferocious attack.

At the mortuary, it was noticed that there was a deep, jagged wound

from the... from the breastbone all the way down to the abdomen,

completely severing the tissue in... inside her stomach.

When the authorities went around

saying, "Does anyone recognize this person?"

she was identified as someone they knew as Polly.

Mary Ann Nichols, commonly known as Polly,

she was 43 years old at the time of her murder.

Polly hadn't been in the East End of London for long,

as far as we can tell.

But she'd become an alcoholic, and that led to a downward spiral.

And she was extremely poor, living on her own,

struggling to earn a living through casual prostitution.

She had been drinking that night,

and she didn't have the money to pay for a bed,

so she was ejected from a common lodging house.

She'd gone out for sex work, to raise money for a bed for the night.

Polly's last known words to the deputy of the lodging house is actually,

"See what a jolly bonnet I've got now?"

So that's sort of the words she was saying.

"I'm going out to be able to... to get a gentleman,

because see how beautiful I'm looking."

"I'll be back. Keep my bed. I'll be back shortly."

And that's when she was attacked and horribly mutilated.

The killer put his fingers around her throat,

killing her before she had a chance to cry out.

In the East End in the 1880s,

murder wasn't as... as common as... as you might think it was,

and so, Polly's murder

would have been probably seen by the police at the time as a one-off.

London in 1888 was the biggest city in the world.

You have the West End, very rich, prosperous,

the East End, very, very poor.

Whitechapel was a district within the East End of London.

It was an area where you had people barely able to survive,

people living in poverty, people literally starving to death.

Off the main thoroughfares, you had all these rat-infested alleyways

and courts.

Really, really horrific. People living in awful conditions.

Many single women in the East End couldn't afford their own house or flat.

So every day, they'd have to try and scrape together four old pennies

for a bed for the night,

in what we call a common lodging house, or doss-house.

And I say "beds,"

but in many of these places, they were actually coffins

lined up in rows up against the walls.

A lot of the women would have to resort to casual prostitution.

It was a case of what they needed to do to... to get that... that income.

There is a term for these women, which was "unfortunates,"

because they'd fallen through the net.

I think Jack the Ripper targeted these women

because they were easy targets and vulnerable ladies walking the streets.

If it was prostitution that they used to survive,

they were the ones who knew the streets.

So, effectively, it was the victims who chose the murder site.

Because of what they did, they knew where to take their clients to

where there was little danger of interruption.

So they chose, unwittingly, the perfect place at which to be murdered.

So Polly Nichols is killed August 31st.

Literally a week later, on 8th September,

another murder takes place, and that's Annie Chapman.

Annie was found murdered in the rear yard of Hanbury Street,

also in the East End, close to where Polly was killed.

She was laying on her back, in the yard, with her face towards the step.

She had terrible mutilations, the same as Polly.

The killer's taken a trophy.

He's cut out and gone off with the womb of the victim,

which suggested that the reason for the murder

had been specifically so the killer could acquire that part of her anatomy.

Annie was the oldest of our victims. She was 47 years old.

According to police reports, Annie had no income whatsoever.

To survive, she started selling trinkets on the streets.

When that didn't work, then she would resort to casual prostitution.

Again, as with Polly Nichols, on the night before her murder,

she hasn't got the money to pay for her bed.

So witnesses said she was walking around, looking for a client,

and then, at some point that night, a witness had seen Annie talking to a man

outside the front door to 29 Hanbury Street,

but she didn't see his face.

She later said he had the appearance of a foreigner

from the way he was dressed.

It's believed that this was Jack the Ripper.

And according to police records, what we know happens next,

the two go through the entrance, which was never locked, to Number 29.

It led into a passageway.

And the dark passageway led into the backyard.

That's where Jack kills Annie.

Staying at Number 27 Hanbury Street at the time of Annie's murder,

which was the house next door,

uh, was a man... a man named Albert Cadosch.

He was going into the toilet, which was at the bottom of the garden,

and he overhears a cry of "no" and a thud against the fence.

And many believe that was actually Annie's body hitting the fence.

In all probability, if he had looked over the fence,

he would have witnessed the murder of Annie Chapman being committed.

Annie's throat had been cut from left to right,

back to the spinal column.

She'd been ripped up to the breastbone.

Her intestines had been taken out and placed over her shoulder.

At her feet were several objects from her calico pocket,

which had been cut open.

There was a comb, a piece of paper,

all sorts of things just out of her pocket that she'd been wearing.

He'd laid them out, almost systematically, at her feet.

Very bizarre.

And because she's been mutilated in the same way as Polly,

police believe that both murders were by the same hand.

At the scene of the crime,

they're looking for any clues that the murderer's left behind.

And that's when the police find a freshly-washed leather apron

in the corner of the yard.

And they think, "Oh, we've got him. We've got the murderer."

And the reason for that bit of excitement was,

after the murder of Polly Nichols,

the police were already investigating a suspect known as Leather Apron.

At the time, the prostitutes in Whitechapel

had started talking about this sinister character called Leather Apron,

and they're convinced this is the man responsible.

Leather Apron was a man named John Pizer who lived in Whitechapel.

He was a cobbler. For his work, he naturally wore a leather apron.

So when they found the leather apron,

they dragged him off down to the police station

where they gave him a good interrogation.

Now, it turns out the leather apron they found

has got nothing to do with the murder.

It was just a local resident had cleaned his leather apron

and laid it over the, uh, fence to dry off.

Pizer had cast-iron alibis for the nights of the murders,

so he was then released as a suspect.

And it turns out he's only the first of an awful lot of suspects in the case.

At this point, the police recognized

that there was, um, something highly amiss in Whitechapel.

Two dreadful murders, terrible mutilations,

most likely killed by the same hand.

What was frightening was that there was somebody out there

who wanted to kill you,

and you'd never met them, you'd never done them any harm.

They weren't killing you for a reason.

Horror starts to set in about these murders.

People thought, "What sort of monster would do this?"

There is a sense the killer knew his way around Whitechapel.

Whitechapel, at the time, was made up of lots of narrow alleyways,

twisty little passageways that went between buildings.

All he needs to know is where the nearest bolt-hole is

that he can get down quickly and escape from the scene of the crime.

And then when he's made Whitechapel Road,

the busy main road that goes through the heart of the area,