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motive, whether gain, jealousy or revenge, in his crimes. Casting about for an explanation, some turned to the far past. ‘It is so impossible to account . . . for these revolting acts of blood,’ commented one, ‘that the mind turns as it were instinctively to some theory of occult force, and the myths of the Dark Ages rise before the imagination. Ghouls, vampires, bloodsuckers, and all the ghastly array of fables which have been accumulated throughout the course of centuries take form, and seize hold of the excited fancy.’ Others, sensing that the Ripper’s origins lay in the social and economic upheavals of the new industrial age, glimpsed the future. ‘Suppose we catch the Whitechapel murderer,’ queried the Southern Guardian , ‘can we not, before handing him over to the executioner or the authorities at Broadmoor, make a really decent effort to discover his antecedents, and his parentage, to trace back every step of his career, every hereditary instinct, every acquired taste, every moral slip, every mental idiosyncrasy? Surely the time has come for such an effort as this. We are face to face with some mysterious and awful product of modern civilization.’ 1
    Those who hunted the Ripper, too, believed they were confronting a new and frightening phenomenon. ‘I look upon this series of murders as unique in the history of our country,’ Warren told Henry Matthews, the Home Secretary, at the height of the scare. George Lusk, President of the Mile End Vigilance Committee, formed to assist the police, agreed. ‘The present series of murders,’ he assured the Home Office, ‘is absolutely unique in the annals of crime . . . and all ordinary means of detection have failed.’ 2
    But none of this explains the Ripper’s continual hold on popular imagination, his most potent legacy to the world. Some would have it that those who read or write about the murders are misogynists. I am not a misogynist. Nor, for that matter, is any serious student of the case personally known to me. It should be obvious from the most cursory glance at the literature, moreover, that what really fascinatespeople about the story is the question of the killer’s identity. After a series of horrific murders Jack the Ripper disappeared, as if ‘through a trapdoor in the earth’ as a contemporary put it, and left behind a mystery as impenetrable as the fog that forms part of his legend. He left us, in short, with the classic ‘whodunnit.’
    It is this that lies at the root of our enduring fascination with the case. Good mysteries become obsessive. A century ago Percival Lowell spent a fortune in building the Lowell Observatory in Arizona specifically to find the canals of Mars. In the 1960s Tim Dinsdale, monster hunter extraordinaire, abandoned his career as an aeronautical engineer to search the waters of Loch Ness. And, driven by similar irresistible urges to know the truth, amateur sleuths in at least three continents still seek final proof of the identity of Jack the Ripper.
    Since 1891, when the last victim widely attributed to the Ripper died, we have had an ever-growing mountain of books and a welter of theories. Looking at the size of that mountain and the dramatic finality of many of the titles that form it – The Final Solution , The Mystery Solved , etc. – the general reader might well ask: is there anything new to be said about Jack the Ripper? The answer, surprisingly, is an emphatic ‘Yes’! For the fact is that the conventional story of the murders, as passed down to us in these books, is shot through with errors and misconceptions and that, with very few exceptions, their authors have taken us, not towards, but away from the truth.
    The whole subject is now a minefield to the unwary. Even true crime experts venture there at their peril. ‘No new books will tell us anything more than we already know’. This was the confident claim of Brian Marriner, reviewing the Ripper case in his valuable book, A Century of Sex