On August 31^st 1888 the murder of a prostitute in Whitechapel area of London marked the beginning of a series of brutal murders that would take place for several months. The experts believed up to six women were murdered during this period in terrible gruesome ways. The women were killed in ways that authorities had not been exposed to before such as disembowelment or removing the women’s organs. These murders were believed to be connected, and were attributed as the work on one man, who would become known as Jack the Ripper. After the first murder newspapers received numerous letters that said they were written by the killer who dubbed himself Jack the Ripper, hence where he received the name. While the letters were decided to be fake, one letter which later became known as the “Dear Boss” letter received by the Central News Agency of London was the first to ever be signed Jack the Ripper. The letter took responsibility for the murder of second victim Annie Chapman and said the next victim would have their ear cut off, which the next victim did. This led to the letter being marked as genuine. Several postcards were also sent in, which would later be marked as genuine as well. The Jack the Ripper murders stopped a few months later with no explanation or arrests, no one knew for sure whether the crimes were linked or where the alleged killer vanished to.

Citations:

Nini, Andrea. “An Authorship Analysis of the Jack the Ripper Letters.” Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, vol. 33, no. 3, Sept. 2018, pp. 621–636. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1093/llc/fqx065