This is not just another Jack the Ripper book.
And that’s by way of saying,
Today’s a red letter day.
Publication day for Richard Walker’s groundbreaking new book,
Richard Walker – was a walking tour guide ever more happily named? – Richard Walker is of course our, London Walks’ in-a-league-of-his-own Jack the Ripper guide.
Splendid fellow.
And what a career. What a life story.
Ranging from yachting across the Pacific in a tiny two-man vessel to 30 years on the London stage to becoming a leading expert on what happened in Whitechapel in the Autumn of Terror.
And yes, Richard’s twice weekly Ripper Walk is the gold standard. It’s the costs more,
VIP,
small-group guaranteed Ripper walk that sells out week in and week out.
Now as for Richard’s book,
no question but it’s going to make waves.
It’s already come in for some serious praise.
One critic called it the definitive book on the subject.
Another whetted the appetite by describing it as a tour de force. Who amongst us doesn’t look favourably on a book that’s a tour de force?
A third member of the inky brigade said “leave your preconceptions at the door and prepare to have your eyes opened.”
Well, a critical reception like that has certainly opened my eyes.
Anyway, here’s an extract, a taster.
1: The Story Everyone Knows
In the gaslit streets of Victorian London,
a monster stalked the night.
Jack the Ripper –
the name still sends shivers down spines nearly 140 years later.
We know the story:
a shadowy figure
preying on prostitutes
in the dark alleys of Whitechapel, vanishing into the fog
after each brutal murder.
It’s a tale that has spawned countless books, films and theories.
Crime writer Patricia Cornwell spent millions trying to prove the killer was the Victorian artist Walter Sickert.
Businessman Russell Edwards bought a bloodstained shawl, convinced DNA would finally unmask the Ripper.
There’s one problem:
the story they and everyone else have heard is wrong.
Tour Guides, DNA and Kate Eddowes’ Shawl
I’m Richard Walker, a London tour guide.
The first walk I learned and delivered was the Jack the Ripper tour.
It appeared to be an exciting acting challenge,
a piece of street theatre
in which I would perform
a one-man show with a gift of a story to tell.
The most popular guided walk in London is about this unknown serial killer.
Viator lists 87 companies offering Jack the Ripper tours.
It’s a fantastic story combining whodunnit, horror and illicit sex, set in gaslit Victorian London.
And I was fortunate with my timing,
as interest in the case surged in the new millennium.
Johnny Depp and Heather Graham added a little glamour to the tale in the film From Hell,
which put the murders back in the headlines in 2001.
In the same year,
Patricia Cornwell began her research,
and in 2002 she published her book Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed,
which became a bestseller.
Russell Edwards left a Cambridge cinema fired with a new interest kindled by From Hell.
That new interest led Russell to ‘a shawl belonging to Kate Eddowes’,
and in 2014 he published Naming Jack the Ripper.
Both books claimed DNA evidence solved the mystery.
Russell Edwards says confidently, ‘We have definitely solved the mystery of who Jack the Ripper was.
Only non-believers that want to perpetuate the myth will doubt.’
Both writers believe they’ve solved the case.
They can’t both be right,
though both could be wrong.
What is certain is
they’ve been swept up in a story shaped by Victorian assumptions that continue to influence how we interpret the evidence today.
Exploring My Doubts
During the COVID lockdown, I couldn’t stop exploring my doubts about these 19th-century crimes against women.
Revisiting the books I had read led me to new research,
revealing a glaring problem with the standard story.
I discovered that much of what we ‘know’ about these murders
rests on assumptions that have never been appropriately challenged.
These were assumptions made by police officers and journalists. They were all men.
Men who were working in or reporting on a highly charged situation.
The best of us would be
challenged.
Even in our more enlightened times,
challenges persist and things are far from perfect.
The London Metropolitan Police commissioned Louise Casey to investigate
after one of its officers abducted Sarah Everard
from a London street
in March 2021,
before raping and murdering her.
The 363-page report details disturbing stories of sexual assaults usually covered up or downplayed, with 12% of women working for the Met saying they had been harassed or attacked at work,
and one-third experiencing sexism. The report concluded that the Metropolitan Police is
broken and rotten,
suffering collapsing public trust and is guilty of institutional racism,
misogyny and homophobia.
If in our 21st-century Metropolitan Police Force,
we have ‘sexual assaults usually covered up or downplayed’,
what would we expect from the Metropolitan Police shaped by,
and dealing with, the culture prevalent in 19th-century Britain?
This matters because the conviction
that a murderer was killing prostitutes
meant the police ignored another, more likely scenario.
This blinkered view of the case almost certainly caused a catastrophic failure to secure justice for the victims.
The conviction arose simply from the question:
‘What woman would end up alone at night with a potential killer?’ Answer: a prostitute.
There were no cameras to record the moments leading up to and including each murder,
so that conviction is a possible explanation,
but it is not a fact.
Fact: the first four of the five victims were homeless
and frequently had no other choice but to sleep rough,
and the fifth victim
slept in a room that was not secure.
Fact: the five victims were killed when they were lying down.
Fact: in each case,
there was no sign of a struggle.
Fact: in each case,
they were killed in a densely populated area
within yards of where people slept, and nobody heard a sound.
Fact: the murders took place
in an area that was less than one square mile,
an area that was heavily patrolled by police,
vigilantes and a population that was on full alert,
yet the killer – or killers – escaped every time.
Fact: the simplest explanation is that the women were killed by an opportunist who found an easy target as they slept.
Occam’s Razor
William of Occam was a Franciscan friar born in Ockham, Surrey, England.
He became a significant figure
of medieval thought in 14th-century Europe.
Occam’s razor,
also known as the principle of parsimony,
suggests that you should choose the simplest explanation
if there is more than one explanation for a phenomenon.
That is Occam’s razor.
I refer to it in this book,
so it’s essential to verify whether we can use it on Jack the Ripper.
If you check for where the simplest explanation appears to be wrong, you will find examples.
Darwin’s theory of evolution provides a unifying explanation for the tremendous variety of life on earth,
all of which evolved over billions of years from a single origin. Darwin’s assumption was that individuals within a population of any species vary;
the variations are passed down through the generations;
and the individuals with the variations best adapted to suit their environment
are more likely to survive and reproduce.
Once upon a time,
there was a single cell adapting with all its might,
and four billion years later,
we have David Attenborough,
all thanks to the power of natural selection.
All of which, for me,
is a simple explanation for the wonderful variety of life on earth.
However, some have pointed out that while Darwin’s assumptions are pretty straightforward,
there are mind-bogglingly complex fields of evolutionary biology
and genetics,
so there is a more straightforward explanation
for the variety of life on earth: God.
It is claimed that this shows that Occam’s razor
may not always give you the correct explanation.
You will have your own opinion, but for me,
God requires far more assumptions,
complexity and a giant leap of faith than does Darwin.
Writing in Open Mind,
theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili gave another example of where Occam’s razor might not work.
He asked the physicist Peter Higgs to explain the Higgs boson in 30 seconds.
Al-Khalili said, “he looked at me solemnly and,
I have to admit, not particularly apologetically,
and shook his head.
He explained that it had taken him many decades
to understand the physics underlying the Higgs mechanism in quantum field theory,
so how could people expect such a complex subject to be condensed into a short sound bite?
I am not familiar with alternative theories to the Higgs mechanism in quantum field theory,
so I can’t make a decision about which explanation is the simplest.
Occam’s razor doesn’t say that everything is simple;
it says you should choose the simplest explanation
when there is more than one,
as it is likely to be correct.
Explanations for how something happens in the field of quantum physics are no doubt complex,
but other things being equal,
the simplest of those complex explanations is likely to be the best choice.
What interested me in Jim Al-Khalili’s article was when he warned that
‘it is hard to fight the human impulse
to look for the simplest account of something we don’t understand’.
What I found fascinating about that statement is how many Victorian police officers, journalists and modern-day experts on the Jack the Ripper case
have effortlessly overcome
‘the human impulse
to look for the simplest account of something we don’t understand’.
There are numerous examples of where the simplest explanation – indeed what many would regard as common sense –
was ignored.
The book I have written does not wrestle with the Higgs boson, complex fields of evolutionary biology and genetics
or whether God exists.
It is simply about the murders of several women in 1888,
and how those murders were,
and are, investigated.
This book examines why the most straightforward explanation was, and is, ignored
and what happens when we apply Occam’s razor to the Whitechapel murders.
When we strip away prejudices and examine the evidence without predetermined conclusions,
a different story emerges.”
Thanks, Richard.
And you want to be privy to that different story – see what Richard’s tracked down and cornered – these links, here in the transcript, will get you there.
And speaking of different stories,
a very different story is now being teed up here at London Calling
and will emerge tomorrow. Different story.
And a different narrator. Tomorrow’s an extremely important anniversary in the history of London –
indeed, in the history of modern cities generally –
what happened on March 25th nearly two hundred years ago made modern cities possible. Author and
former Museum Curator and London Walks guide par excellence
will be telling us that tale.
Sending it down the slipways as it were.
And on that note,
London Calling.
London Walks connecting.
This is London.
This is London Walks.
Streets ahead.
Story time.
History time.
Valediction time.
Here’s to generous helpings of great Londoning.
See you tomorrow.