Who was Jack the Ripper? Part 2 © Brenda Gambrell
Apr 1, 2001
Believed to be the most intriguing unsolved mystery of all time, the name Jack the Ripper, originating from a fake letter sent to the London Press, continues to intrigue and terrify us over 100 years after the killer preyed on prostitutes in the foggy gas lit streets of London. Thousands have debated the guilt of these top five Ripper suspects, yet we will never know if the Ripper simply slipped quietly out of sight, never being fingered for the grisly crimes.
Inspector Abberline, the head of the Jack the Ripper investigation, had his own theory as to the identity of the Ripper, labeling George Chapman as a likely suspect. Chapman, his real name Severin Klosowski, was born in Poland in 1865 and entered an apprenticeship as a surgeon in Warsaw. He immigrated to London in 1887 and found work as a barber’s assistant in the Whitechapel district, close to where the murders were committed. Chapman was a “lady’s man,” often living with one woman while he was still married to another and was known to have been abusive to his wives. He ultimately resorted to using tartar emetic, a colorless, odorless white powder to poison three of his wives and was finally arrested for the murder of his final wife after a doctor found large doses of the poison in her body. Chapman was hanged on April 7, 1903. The fact that Chapman lived in the Whitechapel district during the time of the murders supports Abberline’s theory. It cannot be ignored that he arrived in London shortly before the murders began and the murders ceased when he traveled to America, where another prostitute was killed in a similar fashion. He also had experience as a surgeon and was obviously violent and homicidal towards women. Hard evidence names Chapman as Jack the Ripper, however, the question still remains whether he could transform himself from a brutal mutilator of prostitutes to that of a conniving “wife-poisoner.” The last and most famous of the top five Jack the Ripper suspects is Prince Albert, the grandson of Queen Victoria. This opinion actually didn’t surface until 1962, when the book Edouard VII by Phillippe Jullien was published. Later, several articles, books, and even movies accused Prince Albert of being Jack the Ripper, claiming that syphilis caused him to go insane and commit the murders. Numerous scholars have discredited these accounts, for Prince Albert was in Scotland at the time of two of the murders, he did not possess any medical knowledge, and he was not a violent man.
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