The name Jack the Ripper probably came from a newspaper hoax
The most famous nickname in crime history first appeared in a letter signed by someone claiming to be the Whitechapel killer. Many historians think journalists wrote it themselves to sell papers. The murders of 1888 were never solved, and the legend is now a tangle of research, folklore and pseudohistory.
Whitechapel, in London's East End, was desperately overcrowded by 1888, with about 80,000 residents. Irish immigrants had arrived through the mid-century, and after 1882 Jewish families escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe crowded into the same streets. Housing and work worsened, and 55 percent of East End children died before turning five. Police estimated 1,200 women were selling sex in the district that October, many driven by sheer poverty. Around 8,500 people slept each night in 233 common lodging-houses, paying fourpence for a box-like bed or twopence to sleep slumped over a rope stretched across the room.
Social tension ran high. Demonstrations in 1886 to 1889 brought repeated clashes with police, including Bloody Sunday in 1887, and antisemitism and nativism fed an image of Whitechapel as a den of vice. When a series of killings of poor women began, the press covered them on an unprecedented scale. Police files grouped eleven deaths between April 1888 and February 1891 as the Whitechapel murders, but could not tie them all together. Five deaths between 31 August and 9 November 1888, beginning with Mary Ann Nichols and ending with Mary Jane Kelly, form the so-called canonical five, thought likeliest to share one killer.
Contemporary files and reporters also called the culprit the Whitechapel Murderer or Leather Apron. In September and October 1888 newspapers and Scotland Yard were flooded with letters from people claiming responsibility. The Dear Boss letter introduced the name Jack the Ripper and is widely regarded as a fake. Another, sent From Hell to George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, arrived with a gruesome parcel said to come from a victim.
Speculation that the killer had surgical or anatomical skill arose from the nature of some crimes, but no one was ever charged. Researchers still disagree over how many deaths belong to the same hand, since violence against women in the district was widespread. Mass-circulation newspapers, more than any proven fact, turned an unknown attacker into a worldwide legend.
Source: Jack the Ripper
