Jack the Ripper  

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"On December 1, 1887, July 7, August 8, September 30, one day in the month of October and on the 9th of November, 1888 ; on the 1st of June, the 17th of July and the 10th of September, 1889, the bodies of women were found in various lonely quarters of London ripped open and mutilated in a peculiar fashion. The murderer has never been found. It is probable that he first cut the throats of his victims, then ripped open the abdomen and groped among the intestines. In some instances he cut off the genitals and carried them away; in others he only tore them to pieces and left them behind. He does not seem to have had sexual intercourse with his victims, but very likely the murderous act and subsequent mutilation of the corpse were equivalents for the sexual act." --Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia Sexualis, 1886

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Jack the Ripper is an alias given to an unidentified serial killer (or killers) active in the largely impoverished Whitechapel area and adjacent districts of London, England in the latter half of 1888 . The name is taken from a letter to the Central News Agency by someone claiming to be the murderer, published at the time of the killings.

The legends surrounding the Ripper murders have become a combination of genuine historical research, conspiracy theory and folklore. The lack of a confirmed identity for the killer has allowed Ripperologists — the term used within the field for the authors, historians and amateur detectives who study the case — to accuse a wide variety of individuals of being the Ripper. Newspapers, whose circulation had been growing during this era, bestowed widespread and enduring notoriety on the killer owing to the savagery of the attacks and the failure of the police in their attempts to capture the Ripper, sometimes missing the murderer at his crime scenes by mere minutes.

Victims were women earning income as casual prostitutes. Typical Ripper murders were perpetrated in a public or semi-public place; the victim's throat was cut, after which the body was mutilated. Some believe that the victims were first strangled in order to silence them and to explain the lack of reported blood at the crime scenes. The removal of internal organs from some victims has led to the proposal that the killer possessed anatomical or surgical knowledge or skill.

In September 2014, author Russell Edwards claimed to have exposed the serial killer's true identity using DNA evidence. His book and DNA evidence purport Jack the Ripper to be 23-year-old Polish immigrant Aaron Kosminski.


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Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Jack the Ripper" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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