Jack the Ripper Never Named Himself. Scotland Yard Believed a Reporter Did.

Jack the Ripper Never Named Himself. Scotland Yard Believed a Reporter Did. On 27 September 1888 a London news agency, the Central News Agency, received a letter in red ink addressed "Dear Boss". It asked the agency to hold it back until the writer had done "a bit more work", and it was signed with a name nobody had used before: Jack the Ripper. Within a week the police had pasted facsimiles of it outside their stations. The men who ran the investigation did not believe the killer wrote it. In 1910 Sir Robert Anderson called it the creation of an enterprising London journalist. In 1913 Chief Inspector John Littlechild named the man: Tom Bullen of the Central News. In 2018 a forensic linguist went back to the words. This film follows the documents: Whitechapel in 1888, the five women by name, Leather Apron and the halfpenny press, the Dear Boss letter and the Saucy Jacky postcard, the police posters, the flood of copycat letters, George Lusk and the From Hell letter, the Goulston Street writing that was washed away before it could be photographed, the Macnaghten memorandum, the police memoirs, the Littlechild letter, Thomas Bulling's copy of the third letter, the letter's disappearance and anonymous return in 1987, and Andrea Nini's 2018 study. A note on accuracy: who wrote the letter has never been proven. This film reports what the police believed and what the linguistic evidence shows. Frederick Best's 1931 claim is second-hand. No mortuary or crime-scene photographs are shown, and no killer is named, because the record names none. CHAPTERS 0:00 The hook 0:59 The East End 1:33 Mary Ann Nichols 2:21 Annie Chapman 3:01 Leather Apron 3:57 The Central News Agency 4:21 The letter 5:12 What the agency did 5:36 The double event 7:00 The postcard 7:44 The posters 8:23 The flood 8:44 From hell 9:39 The graffito 10:32 No reward 10:56 Mary Jane Kelly 11:44 Warren goes 12:14 The end of the series 12:33 The Macnaghten memorandum 13:18 Anderson, 1910 13:53 Macnaghten, 1914 14:12 The Littlechild letter 14:56 Thomas Bulling 15:25 Fred Best 15:56 Missing 16:15 Returned 16:35 The linguist 17:49 Close Forty-first film in a series on the archive behind the famous stories. Same method as the rest: the official version, then the documents. SOURCES Dear Boss letter, dated 25 September 1888, received by the Central News Agency 27 September. Saucy Jacky postcard, postmarked 1 October 1888. Metropolitan Police facsimile notice, 3 October 1888. From Hell letter to George Lusk, 16 October 1888. Macnaghten memorandum, 23 February 1894. Robert Anderson, Blackwood's Magazine, March 1910, and The Lighter Side of My Official Life (1910). John Littlechild to George R. Sims, 23 September 1913. Andrea Nini, "Examining an author's individual grammar", Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 33:3 (2018). IMAGE CREDITS The Illustrated Police News; The Penny Illustrated Paper; The Illustrated London News; Punch; Puck; the Metropolitan Police and City of London Police files; Gustave Doré, London: A Pilgrimage (1872). All public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. #JackTheRipper #Whitechapel #VictorianLondon #TrueCrime #History