Showing Tag: "jack" (Show all posts)

Whitechapel: Poverty Breeds Crime

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guidev on Monday, October 11, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

The Whitechapel murders by Jack the Ripper took place in 1888 in one of the most poverty-stricken places in London. Whitechapel was an area with massive overcrowding caused by multiple reasons:


From the 1840’s farming started to become mechanised people fled to London looking for work. The Irish Potato Famine from1845 meant one million Irish people left their homes in search of a new life abroad. Some came to London, some of those later went on to America. From the mid 1800’s Jews fled fro...


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William Bury - Jack The Ripper Suspect

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, August 13, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

One of the lesser-known suspects for the Ripper murders is William Bury and his is a strange tale indeed!


He was born in May 1859, orphaned at an early age and attended a charitable school in the Midlands. After he left school, he was in regular employment for a while and then got into financial difficulties and was dismissed for stealing. He became a street pedlar. In 1887 he moved to London and met and married Ellen Elliot, who was probably a prostitute. Their marriage was stormy, punctuated...


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Suspect Montague John Druitt

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, July 29, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

Montague John Druitt was 31 years of age at the time of the Jack the Ripper murders. He had been born into a reasonably well-off family from Wimborne Dorset, and went to New College Oxford in 1876. He graduated three years later with a third-class honours degree in classics, thereafter taking up a post as a teacher at Blackheath Boys School, a boy’s preparatory school. It was a successful school, run by George Valentine who was widely respected as a headmaster.


Druitt played cricket at the M...


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Graves of the Victims of Jack the Ripper

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, June 3, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

Walking round on a Jack the Ripper walk, I am sure that most people would be wondering where all the victims of Jack the Ripper were buried. Even though most of these women were buried in common graves as their families either could not be traced or did not have the money to buy them a plot in a cemetery, it is still possible to find and visit their resting places.


Here is a list of all the graves that have been discovered up until now.


Martha Tabram - unknown but most likely common grave in th...


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Why Was Jack the Ripper Never Caught?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Tuesday, March 9, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

I think there are many reasons why the police did not catch Jack the Ripper, even though at one time they believed that they were only five minutes behind him after the murder of Catherine Eddowes on 30 September 1888, the night of the double event.

One reason was that policing in those days was far removed from the efficient methods of today. Just imagine no fingerprinting until 1906, no crime scene analysis, no DNA, no genetic sequencing, or any of the other tools that the police now have.

On...


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The Common Thread Among All The Victims of Jack

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, January 8, 2021, In : Jack the Ripper 

All the victims of Jack the Ripper had a few things in common. They were all poverty stricken, all lived in Whitechapel at the time of their death, and they were all alcoholics.

 

Most were around or over the age of 40, so these were prostitutes at the end of the line. This includes Martha Tabram, Polly Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. All of these were over 40, except Martha Tabram who was 39, (strangely enough this was the amount of stab wounds inflicted on her ...


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Walter Sickert

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Friday, November 13, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

According to the book Portrait of a Killer, Jack The Ripper Case Closed by Patricia Cornwell, Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper, the murderer who stalked the streets of Whitechapel in 1888.

 

Patricia Cornwell went to a great deal of trouble and expense trying to prove her theory. She even spent about £1million in the attempt. She bought Sickert’s desk and cut some of his paintings out of their frames, desperately searching for DNA from blood/skin shreds she hoped to find on the edges of th...


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James Maybrick: Fact or Fiction?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Monday, September 14, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

James Maybrick, a cotton broker from Liverpool, did not become a suspect until 1992 when a diary written on part of a Victorian ledger was rumoured to have been found by Tony Devereux, in the attic of Battlecrease House, Aigburth in Liverpool, the former residence of Maybrick. He supposedly gave it to a friend Michael Barrett in a pub, but the story later changed as his wife Ann said it had been in her family for generations. She had asked Devereux to give it to her husband because he had lit...


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Was Francis Tumblety Jack the Ripper?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, May 14, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

 A man of dubious character to be sure, as at 15 he was selling pornographic books and papers on the canal packet boats. He apparently disappeared from the area, returning years later he advertised he was ‘a great physician’, but he was really a man who sold potions from the back of a wagon. One of these, for pimples, was very effective and made him a fortune.  A boastful flamboyant man, who held sumptuous dinner parties in his tastefully furnished apartment in Washington, intimate with m...


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John Pizer a Possible Jack the Ripper Suspect?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Thursday, April 23, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
After Polly Nichols was murdered by Jack the Ripper on 31 August 1888, followed by Annie Chapman a few days later on 8 September, the police questioned many members of the local community asking if they knew anybody locally who showed a hatred for prostitutes, someone who might attack them, rob them or rape them.

Many people were eager to help the police catch this terrible killer and came forward with a possible suspect - John Pizer, a Polish Jew working at a boot- finisher. Being in that t...

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Was Martha Tabram a Ripper Victim?

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Tuesday, March 3, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
For many years it was not acknowledged that Martha Tabram (Turner) was a victim of Jack.

However, in a recent documentary Jack the Ripper Case Reopened, presented by Emilia Fox, star of Silent Witness with help from Professor David Wilson, a expert criminologist, they uncover many fact that point to the fact that Martha could have been Jack’s first victim not Mary Ann Nichols or Polly as she is better known. Calling this the ultimate cold case he carefully looks at the murders with cold case...


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Why we provide Jack the Ripper tours

Posted by Hazel Baker, Director of London Guided Walks on Monday, February 10, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 

In today’s Guardian author and social historian Hallie Rubenhold has announced her plans to commemorate the lives of the women murdered by Jack the Ripper with a new mural in Whitechapel.  She claims Ripper tours are ‘atrocious’. 

One of the most popular questions we get asked by people is if we provide a Jack the Ripper tour. Yes we do. If we didn’t, they would just go with someone else. Is it not better to provide a Ripper tour which truly reflects the Whitechapel of 1888, the murky...


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Who was Jack the Ripper?

Posted by Jenny, Jack the Ripper Guide on Saturday, February 1, 2020, In : Jack the Ripper 
Who Was Jack?

This is the most common question that I an asked by people attending the tour. His Identity is a never-ending source of mystery and interest to most people.

To answer this question, I have studied many books, films and police reports from the time and I have a unique answer which explains why, after Mary Kelly he never struck again and disappeared just as mysteriously as he had started these horrific murders. I love the mystery of this case and take great delight with sharing my...
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Jack the Ripper and Winter Nights

Posted by Jenny Phillips, Jack the Ripper Tour Guide on Sunday, December 29, 2019, In : Jack the Ripper 
What a perfect time to do a Jack the Ripper Walk as the streets are dark (from 4:00 pm and starting at between 6-7:30 you can be sure of a great atmosphere on the walk. It’s even better when it’s misty or cold, as this gruesome walk will make you shiver to your bones.

A mysterious man our Jack never caught at the time, never really identified. So, who was he? You had a multitude of suspects even at the time, as the police arrested and questioned over three hundred men but never found enou...
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