Jack The Ripper Unmasked
The Letters That Shook Victorian London
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Let’s step into the misty backdrop of London city UK, 1888, where the air in Whitechapel is heavy, not just with fog, but with a palpable fear and dread, a dread that’s almost alive, breathing down the necks of the city’s citizens, because there’s a killer on the loose, Jack the Ripper, his name alone enough to send shivers down the spine, and in this climate of fear, letters begin to appear, letters that claim to be written by Jack the Ripper himself.
These aren’t ordinary letters, no, they’re sinister, they’re taunting, filled with details that are too gruesome to be anything but real, or so it seems, and the most chilling of them all is the "Dear Boss" letter, it landed in the hands of the police on September 24th, 1888, and it was like a punch in the gut, it talks about horrific murders yet to come, that were being planned, and it’s written with such confidence, such bravado that it had the police scared out of their minds.
The newspapers, they lap it up, they can't get enough, because this is the story of the century, and it's selling papers like nothing ever before, The Sun, in particular, make a total show of it, splashing the "Dear Boss" letter on the front page, and suddenly, it's not just Whitechapel that's afraid, it's all of London, it's the whole country, caught in the grip of a fear that's spreading faster than the news itself. It was massive hysteria on a national level.
The big question was? Are these letters real, are they actually from the Ripper, or is it all a hoax and a ploy for attention, because let’s face it, the Ripper murders are big news, and what better way to stoke the fires than with letters that are so well written and theatrical. Then there’s the "Saucy Jacky" postcard, it comes a week after the murder of Mary Jane Kelly, and it’s just as chilling, just as mocking, claiming the murders, taunting the police, and it’s this postcard that really cements the name "Jack the Ripper" in the public’s mind.
The authenticity of these letters, it's been debated for over a century, and we're no closer to the truth, because back then, forensic scienc wasn't ideal. So we're left with these letters, these tantalizing, terrifying letters, and we're also left scratching our heads wondering, who wrote them, what do they mean, and importantly what do they say about us, about our fascination with the macabre, about our relationship with the media.
All images below are from 1988 with no known author and are creative commons in the public domain from Wikipedia.
