Jack the Ripper mystery breakthrough after handwriting expert matched ‘two of the serial killer’s letters’
A handwriting expert believes two of Jack the Ripper's letters were written by the same person
THE mystery surrounding the letters supposedly written by Jack the Ripper may have come a step closer to being solved after an expert said two of the letters were written by the same person.
Hundreds of letters were written to the police and the media supposedly from the notorious killer in the wake of the savage murders in Whitechapel, London in 1888.
The actual origin of the letters has remained a mystery with many believing they were written by journalists in an attempt to boost circulation.
Now, a scientist has provided some new evidence that suggests two of the serial killer’s letters were written by the same person.
The study focused on the ‘Dear Boss’ letter, in which the name Jack the Ripper appears for the first time, and the ‘Saucy Jacky’ postcard.
It found similar linguistic constructions in both letters, such as the phrasal verb ‘to keep back’, as well as similarities in the handwriting.
Both letters also have a likeness to a third text long thought to be a hoax, known as the ‘Moab and Midian’ letter.
Dr Andrea Nini, from the University of Manchester, undertook a ‘cluster analysis’ of 209 letters linked to the Ripper, studying similarities in the documents’ text.
The Dear Boss letter, scrawled in red ink, was received by the Central News Agency in London on September 27, 1888, and forwarded to Scotland Yard.
The key suspects
While hundreds of people have been named as possibly being Jack the Ripper the vicious killer has never been found out.
Police suspected the Ripper must have been a butcher, due to the way his victims were killed and the fact they were discovered near to the dockyards, where meat was brought into the city.
Prince Albert
Prince Albert Victor, the Duke of Clarence is perhaps the most well known suspect. Some authors have argued that he was the serial killer, but contemporary documents show that Albert Victor could not have been in London at the time of the murders, and the claim is widely dismissed.
Aaron Kosminski
Police also suspected the Jewish Polish emigrant who worked as a hairdresser who was admitted to Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum and died there. Police officials from the time of the murders named one of their suspects as “Kosminski” (the forename was not given), and described him as a Polish Jew in an insane asylum.
James Maybrick
Cotton merchant Maybrick was the police’s number one suspect for a while following the publication of some of his diary which appeared to suggest he was the killer. Some believe the diary to be a forgery, although no one has been able to suggest who forged it.
Thomas Cutbush
Cutbush, a violent criminal, He worked in Whitechapel at the time of the killings and allegedly harboured a hatred for prostitutes and a grim fascination with medicine and surgery.
Francis Thompson
The spotlight has also fallen on Thompson, a respected poet, is alleged to have carried out the murders because he wrote about killing people, had surgical experience and was known to be close to one prostitute in the Whitechapel area at the time.
‘Saucy Jacky’ was used as a reference to the killer in a postcard received by the Central News Agency on October 1, 1888.
Dr Nini told Gizmodo: “My conclusion is that there is very strong linguistic evidence that these two texts were written by the same person.
“’People in the past had already expressed this tentative conclusion, on the basis of similarity of handwriting, but this had not been established with certainty.”
He added: “In addition to the historical value of my findings, they could help forensic linguists to better understand the important issue of individuality in linguistic production.
“Since all the hoaxers tried to mimic the style of the original ‘Jack the Ripper’, we can use the database of the letters to understand how people fake writing style – and how successful they are at imitation.
“The results indicate that it is very difficult to do so.’
“This study doesn’t identify the killer, or the author of the two letters, but it does seem to back up the journalist theory.”
Jack, one of the country’s most infamous killers is thought to have slaughtered at least five women in East London over the course of three months, but was never caught.
The unidentified killer is thought to have killed five women – Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly.
The attacks by Jack the Ripper usually focused on prostitutes who had their throats cut before having their bodies mutilated and organs removed in a brutal fashion.
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