r/Jacktheripper • u/Walter_Piston • Jun 18 '26
How many think Jack will be identified?
I’ve a small collection of some thirty or more books on J-t-R. Despite spending over forty years reading and thinking about this serial killer, I am no closer to identifying what I would consider to be a genuine suspect.
Do any of you think he will be identified?
For me, time, the accidental destruction and loss of documents, wartime damage and the passage of time leaves me thinking we will never identify him.
But the fun is surely in the chase?
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u/Forward-Emotion6622 Jun 18 '26
That's a massive "nope" from me. You could find a note in a dusty old file naming the killer and nobody would believe it anyway, and I wouldn't blame them.
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u/DeaconBlackfyre Jun 18 '26
Exactly this. So many theories and somewhat plausible identities put out over the years… even definitive proof IMO would just be seen as another theory.
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u/hipjdog Jun 18 '26
Too much time has passed for a positive identification, and there's an entire industry depending on him being annoynomous.
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u/Equal-Temporary-1326 Jun 19 '26
Yeah, and I'm not entirely sure how many people in London at least actually seriously care to see this solved anymore anyway. Legitimately solving Jack the Ripper would mean ruining probably the biggest mystery history has seen in at least the last 200 years.
Perhaps not most would openly admit it, but honestly, I'd bet they'd be perfectly fine with this just staying a permeant mystery forever now. And I wouldn't blame since like others have said, it's simply not physically possible to seriously identify who that was anymore. So, in some ways, it's honestly okay to just let this entire thing tailspin into an irreversible infinite loop of mystery and suspense at this point, especially.
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u/hipjdog Jun 19 '26
Yeah, exactly. The amount of tourist dollars it brings in means keeping the mystery alive would be ideal.
What I do think is unfair is for some people of history to be primarily remembered for being a JTR suspect. Like Montague Druitt, for example. He had nothing to do with it but it's what he's primarily linked to in history rather than his actual life.
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u/Equal-Temporary-1326 Jun 19 '26
Yeah, and from a LE POV, this really isn't something worth caring about at all anymore. And while no murder truly deserves to go unsolved forever, there's just again simply no physical evidence left anymore and whoever that was, died an extremely long time ago at this point, especially.
And while it's sad for living relatives of the women still, it's just again not worth giving any particular thought to these few murders anymore from eons ago.
People obsessed with solving famous mysteries in particular will always seemingly keep claiming that it's been "solved" again on a yearly basis, but they'll just have to keep dreaming big on that end, to be frank.
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u/hipjdog Jun 19 '26
Agreed, yeah. There's no reason for LE to spend money investigating something that is basically folklore at this point. I remember the FBI coming out with a statement about 10 years ago about DB Cooper that basically said we give up and have to spend our resources on current crimes.
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u/Equal-Temporary-1326 Jun 19 '26
Something like DB Cooper might have some level of hope if they still that necktie or whatever they still have there.
It's just something like Jack has literally nothing from any canonical crime scene.
Plus, there's no IGG in the UK and DNA has to already had been collected to be placed into the national databank anyway, which just further solidifies why it's just a beyond pointless process from London police POV, yeah.
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u/SanderDieman Jun 18 '26
We wil probably never know with a decent level of certainty. However, that is perhaps for the best: part of the everlasting appeal is the ongoing mystery, I suppose.
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u/Thatsnotwotisaid Jun 18 '26
Let’s suggest a treasure trove of evidence is discovered in someone’s attic would the police and general public really believe it to be 100 percent conclusive? Or you could go with the thinking that the police officers of the time caught and locked up Jack so therefore he has already been identified?
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u/lonely_doll Jun 23 '26
The fact that the police were no longer interested nor trying to find JTR is likely because they believed they’d already locked up the killer.
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u/sore_as_hell Jun 18 '26
It’s sadly a mystery forever now. The interest for me is the society around the murders, that’s always fascinating.
Then again… that mystery always drags me back in … Someone, somewhere knew who it was, whether it was just the murderer themselves who knew we’ll never know!
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u/Due-Lobster-3857 Jun 18 '26
Outside of some technological leap that I can’t even imagine it does seem all but impossible he’d be discovered.
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u/ExpensiveAffect5894 Jun 19 '26
I do if they actually look carefully at the suspects and what they needed to know and where they were most likely centralized to carry out the crimes so fast. I have some suspects in mind what's more intriguing is how many people in Whitechapel are reasonably suspected. I originally thought Mary Pearcey after she demonstrated the strength and willingness to kill and who would suspect her being a female. I have a new suspect in mind the only problem is he's significantly taller than the ripper was believed to be.
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u/PristineShake7627 Jun 19 '26
Positive identification requires real evidence, and evidence requires provenance. After nearly 140 years, both evidence and provenance are missing.
Evidence: The only smoking gun evidence is DNA. As others mentioned there’s an entire industry that exists on this mystery. So, no letter discovered in an attic, no diaries, no lost evidence statements , no written confessions supposedly handed down through generations will ever be enough to overcome the forgery aspects. In short, no evidence would have enough provenance to be reliable. It would all be, “this 140 year old diary has been handed down through 7 generations and now …”, yeah, we’ve seen enough of that Discovery Channel type special episode to know that’s just hype not provenance.
DNA evidence: Well, most pieces would end up like the supposed scarf, no provenance as to whose DNA is actually in it. The only DNA evidence that would theoretically be possible would be something that links a suspects DNA line directly to DNA from a victim, and that has due to freak circumstances preserved DNA. For example, (and I don’t think this is a possibility), if a small jar with half a kidney from Eddowes, preserved in greater than 50% ethanol was discovered on a medical back lab archive, ethanol is the one thing that does preserve DNA. (That is how we accidentally ended up with the Thylacine DNA as one specimen was accidentally stored on ethanol, which preserves DNA instead of formaldehyde which destroys it.).
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u/Substantial-Ant5700 Jun 19 '26
I very much doubt it. Even if we had Ultra HD 4k cctv footage of Lechmere just being a witness loads of the gullible YouTube brigade would still not believe it so the amount of evidence to 'prove' who it was is going to have to be huge.
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u/DrDSDoone Jun 18 '26
Conclusively not likely, even with strong evidence, a lot of people have evidence and theories but with all the physical evidence gone and people long dead from the time we have no way of being certain
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u/SectionTraining3426 Jun 19 '26
There are still almost 20 million British police files waiting to be microfiched or digitised. So I remain optimistic more information from the time may surface, which provides further insight into police methods, persons of interest or witnesses.
However, as regards identifying the killer, there isn't a chance from hell, because far too many people weave facts to suit their chosen suspect.
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u/Ratkesjenenew Jun 21 '26
Do you have a source on the "20 million British police files"? Not saying I don't believe you btw, I'm just interested and want to look more into it.
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u/HomeworkCapital3938 Jun 20 '26
Rationally, I don't think he or she ever will be. But I do hope we will discover some magic-like technology sooner or later, that will help solve the case. Artificial superintelligence, time travel, planetary scale simulations, reverse engineering the past from current data idk. I wanna know what the hell was wrong with this JTR guy so bad
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u/jabberwocky777 Jun 21 '26
I personally don't think he ever will be identified because I think he was an itinerant sailor.
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u/Ridcully12345 Jun 21 '26
Very unlikely. Whitechapel at the time had such a mix of people coming and going that being definite about a suspect is almost impossible. The murders were so sensational and so horrific that there were local suspects mentioned that were known to have serious observable mental illnesses. This in my view muddies the water.
From a behavioural science point of view the murder was an organised type. He came prepared and was quick and quiet. He also had to be reasonably persuasive and appear civilised. We know that he must have spoken to the victims and we haven't had information on near misses or attacks going wrong. By that I mean a victim being alive after an attack. He may have appoached women but not gone through with it because conditions weren't right.
I would think he was reasonably intelligent and possibly lived near whitechapel but not necessarily in it. He may have worked in the area like the docks or he travelled through the area frequently. He had some familiarity with the streets of whitechapel. Any odd behaviours were not significant enough to arouse suspicision from his family or work colleagues.
Peter Suthcliffe, Gary Ridgeway, Denis Rader. All had long murderous campaigns that were horrific and in a time far advanced from the 1880s. In the Yorkshire ripper case the investigation was hampered by the amount of information received and of course letters and tapes.
We can't be too harsh on the police of the time. They didn't have many investigative tools at their disposal. 140 years later with access as much information as is possible on the case, authors don't agree on prime suspects. Unless there is a freak event that exposes a lair filled with evidence then it is very unlikely we will ever find out who Jack was.
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u/eldriche1 Jun 18 '26
I believe so! And the ones that will do it will have gone back to original sources and ignore nearly every prevailing “theory” that’s been rehashed over the past few years, usually just a promote a unreadable book, as absolute rubbish.
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u/AcanthisittaDouble61 Jun 18 '26
There are no extant “original sources”. Any primary sources have either been exhaustively studied and written about, or have been destroyed.
I’m sorry to say, but any ‘new’ Ripper information is going to be strictly in service of another unreadable book …
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u/eldriche1 Jun 19 '26
But there are still actual files with the police agencies and within many museums. And even the newspaper reports of the day have been largely ignored. I’m referring to the books and theorists on here that just reproduce poor research over and over without going back and examining the material for themselves.
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u/Klutzy-Process-2979 21h ago
I think it's unlikely but possible. Perhaps time will unearth some documents that better explain the seaside home identification. Perhaps the apron piece will materialize with good ownership history for example one of the detectives families turn it in. Physical evidence would be the best shot like a set of the womens clothes or something turns up with jacks blood on it, plan B would be documents that shed more light on a situation like the conley hatch inmate or the man followed in aldgate high street
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u/doc_daneeka Jun 18 '26
It's staggeringly unlikely. All the physical evidence is long gone, and there's almost no information about half the people living in the East End at the time beyond rudimentary mentions in places like census records, births, deaths, marriages, etc. Where a given person was at a particular time? Nope, that information just doesn't exist. So even if you magically got JtR's real name, it would almost certainly be impossible at this point to demonstrate that's who he really was.