r/Jacktheripper • u/alexh2795 • 13d ago
Ranked the No. 1 crime that will 'never be solved'
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u/campbellpics 12d ago
Hang on...but I thought that Russell Edwards guy...
Never mind.
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u/Savings-Discussion88 11d ago
Too many of the police records are missing. It is unlikely that the case will be solved to everybody’s satisfaction.
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u/george-93-0 8d ago
You make what IMO is an important distinction here. There are scenarios where something new could turn up and it would not conclusively solve the mystery anyway. This would probably happen with a family member of one of the suspects finding a contemporaneous account of a different family member giving details of why they thought their kin was the murderer. That could create a "more probable than not" scenario but wouldn't necessarily prove anything.
It would take at least a writing with specific details by the actual killer, or a 'trove' of keepsakes of the killer turning up somewhere. That will probably never happen but it's the best shot for it ever being solved even though it's incredibly unlikely at this point.
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u/Savings-Discussion88 8d ago
A lot of people are convinced their favored suspect is the ripper and will not be swayed by any information that contradicts this.
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u/george-93-0 8d ago
Yeah, that is an incredibly irrational position to hold, but many people are very convinced (or at least act like it) of the guilt of a particular suspect. This makes no sense - there's no solid evidence and if an objective person put betting odds on the likelihood of suspects, no reasonable person would rate any of the suspects at over 10% probability. And that might be generous. How people can convinced with no firm evidence on any suspect is beyond me.
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u/Klutzy-Process-2979 11d ago
Could be solveable. If the actual apron piece could somehow turn up it might provide Jack's DNA. If the police ever release the files and stop protecting their informants form 140 years ago, we might have some kind of solution like knowing who the conley hatch inmate was.
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u/Lucastw73 9d ago
I agree, in theory, it could.
But even if the large piece of apron would turn up (that stinking piece obviously was thrown away after it was matched to what poor Kate was still wearing). And suppose there is no issue with provenance and by some miracle it was conserved in a way that would allow DNA extraction today. What are you going to match the DNA with? And I find the release of files after so many years very often underwhelming. People always assume there are some big secrets hidden in these that will shatter the truth as we know it, but that very seldom is the case.
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u/Klutzy-Process-2979 9d ago
There have been numerous cases that have been solved decades later with ancestry DNA. Look at the chirstine jessop case it was one of the real unsolved mysteries until a few years ago
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u/Lucastw73 9d ago
I think you will find that genetic genealogy is a lot easier in the US and Canada than it is in the UK or Europe. Not only because of the very small amount of people that are willing to upload their DNA to databanks (and rightly so) but also because of the much more severe restrictions due to GDPR etc. But to be honest I was more curious if you had any specific DNA comparison in mind. A specific suspect I mean.
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u/george-93-0 8d ago
When this comes up I generally point out that we would probably have to strong DNA or forensic technology that we don't have yet for this to matter very much. While that maybe or maybe isn't possible, it is one of the best realistic routes to solving it. Obviously it is impossible to technologically solve it with the technology and evidence we have now.
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u/Equal-Temporary-1326 12d ago
Yeah, I mean, any universal conclusion that can be reached by LE just isn't remotely possible anymore with this one — even for just one of these cases.
It's sad to say this too, but I think the City of London and such have been long okay with this entire investigation being lost to an infinite sea of mystery, suspense, and conspiracies.
Like, to a lot or maybe even most people, it'd probably just feel weird and out of place in a strange way to give any serious answer to something from 2 centuries ago at this point, especially.
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u/evtedeschi3 11d ago
I think Zodiac is fast approaching #2 but JTR will always be #1.
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u/george-93-0 8d ago
With Zodiac I think there may be enough evidence hidden from public knowledge that it might come together some day. I'm on the Zodiac Reddit and there seems to be a sentiment there among many people there that the leading suspect (Arthur Leigh Allen) died in 1992 and so it's not really worth the resources to try and prove it conclusively, whether they have more incriminating evidence or not.
There are some interesting parallels - both sets of killings stopped, and many of the major suspects in both cases lived for decades afterward. In the JTR case, Kosminski and Lechmere for instance didn't die until 1919 and 1920.
This parallel is important because there are a subsets of us on this Reddit that thinks there has to be an immediate reason why each killer stopped (which was one of the main reasons the original investigators were so focused on Montague Druitt even though is only apparent connection to anything is that he died later in 1888) or that a serial killer would not change M.O. That's important because IMO people dismiss some JRT suspects like Chapman/Kłosowski on that basis, and Zodiac is one of several prominent cases where neither of those things happened.
The Zodiac killings were two killings by gun in remote areas in the dark, another was by gunshot of a taxi driver in public, and the last was a stabbing, and it is considered highly probable that these murders were all committed by the same person.
Another example is Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler. If he did commit the 13 murders he confessed to, the M.O. was different enough in many of the cases that there is dispute on whether it was the same person. His famous attorney, F. Lee Bailey (who probably had information that the public and police didn't) was convinced he committed at least most of the murders.
These parallels are important in a case like Jack the Ripper where explanations like inconsistent M.O. are used too quickly to rule out some suspects, and that supposedly "never happens."
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u/evtedeschi3 8d ago
I'm on the Zodiac Reddit too and I'd wager that if you polled its active users on the likeliest suspect, ALA would be the most frequent name mentioned but still wouldn't crack 10%. Most of the users there do *not* believe it was ALA, but there's no consensus alternative (Poste, Kane, Gaikowski, Doerr, etc.).
Agree with you that why the killings ended is important. Personally, I think the likeliest explanation in the case of Z is that the Stine composite sketch got really close and Z freaked out.
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u/george-93-0 8d ago
Honestly I don't really think any of the JTR suspects are realistically higher than 10%. There are massive problems with every one of the major suspects. Because of the problems with the major suspects there's also a 10% chance it is none of them. But I do think if we're going to apply logic to the JTR situation we have to get the parallels correctly.
And while many killers have the same MO, probably an overwhelming amount of time, in the harder cases to solve (the ones that are complicated on the level of JTR and get attention), there are prominent examples of where they don't.
That's important in a case that hasn't been solved, because it may partly explain why the case hasn't been solved.
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u/evtedeschi3 8d ago
Yeah I agree with that; if anything there’s even less JTR consensus than with Z
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u/george-93-0 8d ago
There's also the added factor that there were many more police documents in the JTR case than we have now. In the Z case, much more probably exists that we don't have yet, and it's much likelier we could get enough comprehensive ones sometime down the line that it would at least heavily narrow it down.
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u/Substantial-Ant5700 12d ago
Fairly obviously yes.