Book Review: Jack the Ripper - The Forgotten Victims

Jack the Ripper: The Forgotten Victimsby Paul Begg & John BennettYale University Press, 2014 The two greatest living experts on Jack the Ripper, Paul Begg and John Bennett, have teamed up once again to produce another volume in what's already become a small shelf's worth of absolutely essential reading on the prototypical Victorian serial killer. Begg and Bennett between them have produced definitive guides, encyclopedias, forensic analyses, and scores of articles on every aspect of the crimes that so shocked the world back in 1888, and even such riches run the risk of repetitiveness. Much like the churning yellow presses of murderer-haunted Whitechapel a century ago, Begg & Bennett are obliged to come up with new angles in their studies of this most-studied of all crimes.This time around, their focus is on the Ripper's victims, and they seek to expand permanently the list of those victims beyond the so-called 'canonical five' of Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Kelly. It was Chief Inspector Fred Abberline, the lead investigator on the Ripper murders, who flatly declared in 1892 that Mary Kelly had been the last woman to die at the hands of the killer. Melville Macnaghten, appointed assistant chief constable of the Metropolitan Police CID in 1889, famously pronounced the matter closed: "the Whitechapel Murderer had 5 victims and 5 victims only."Begg and Bennett don’t share that complacency when contemplating the “endlessly engaging” mystery of the Ripper murders; they’re too aware of how fluid famously pronounced facts can be:

If, in the twenty-first century, we are the accept Melville Macnaghten’s creed of ‘5 victims 5 victims only’ then we are surely ignoring the modern developments in criminal profiling which today feature so prominently in any serial murder investigation and which are being increasingly used in ‘cold case’ approaches regarding the original Ripper murders.

Serial killers change over time, after all. They grow bolder; they experiment; if given time and freedom, they closer and closer figure out the horrible precisions that make them feel their closest approximations of satisfaction. Begg and Bennett apply those ‘cold case’ methods to the Ripper murders mainly by keeping these facts in mind. They sift through police reports, witness statements, and newspaper accounts bracketing the Whitechapel murders by several years in either direction, looking for familiar patterns and hints of the same fiend at work.The names of other potential victims emerge from this record-crawling, and although some of these names – such as Martha Tabram and Emma Elizabeth Smith, both of whom met fates that seem at least on the surface similar to what happened to “the canonical five” – will be familiar to “Ripperologists,” but Begg and Bennett have unearthed many others as well. They’ve found a small and forlorn cast of also-rans who are more or less likely candidates to join a list nobody wants to be on, and since Begg and Bennett are both practiced storytellers, even their logical stretches are thought-provoking.Not all that’s thought-provoking is convincing, naturally. There are plenty of experts on Jack the Ripper who’ve debated even the “canonical five,” and those experts won’t be the only ones to point out the speculation – almost wishful thinking – that fills this book, however entertaining. One of the central, haunting mysteries of Jack the Ripper is the way he suddenly stopped killing; it’s led to countless theories as to why – incarceration? Death? Emigration? And it’s led also to the idea that underlies Jack the Ripper: The Forgotten Victims – that he didn’t stop killing, and that our comfortable notion that he did is the over-neat reduction of a long-ago London constabulary.It’s a grimly interesting possibility, and it’s given an excellent trotting-out in this book, an essential edition to the enthusiast’s library.