Jack The Ripper - Murders

Murders

The large number of attacks against women in the East End during this era adds uncertainty to how many victims were killed by the same person. Eleven separate murders, stretching from 3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891, were included in a London Metropolitan Police Service investigation, and were known collectively in the police docket as the "Whitechapel murders". Opinions vary as to whether these murders should be linked to the same culprit, but five of the eleven Whitechapel murders, known as the "canonical five", are widely believed to be the work of the Ripper. Most experts point to deep throat slashes, abdominal and genital-area mutilation, removal of internal organs, and progressive facial mutilations as the distinctive features of Jack the Ripper's modus operandi. The first two cases in the Whitechapel murders file, those of Emma Elizabeth Smith and Martha Tabram, are not included in the canonical five.

Smith was robbed and sexually assaulted on Osborn Street, Whitechapel, on 3 April 1888. A blunt object was inserted into her vagina, which ruptured her peritoneum. She developed peritonitis, and died the following day at London Hospital. She said that she had been attacked by two or three men, one of whom was a teenager. The attack was linked to the later murders by the press, but most authors conclude that it was gang violence unrelated to the Ripper case.

Tabram was killed on 7 August 1888; she had suffered 39 stab wounds. The savagery of the murder, the lack of obvious motive, and the closeness of the location (George Yard, Whitechapel) and date to those of the later Ripper murders led police to link them. However, the attack differs from the canonical murders in that Tabram was stabbed rather than slashed at the throat and abdomen. Many experts today do not connect it with the later murders because of the difference in the wound pattern.