3.
Both sources have the points that make them quite useful for the question being asked. There are certain points that can be picked out that give little detail.
Source D is useful as it really shows how the police in these days could only work with poor witness accounts to capture the murderer, without catching him red handed. Source D is very vague as the witness Elizabeth Long is never very specific about the details she gives. The source is not very useful due to that Elizabeth Long is very vague and does not manage to give any clear description of the man that supposedly had killed the women and does not mention any sort of names. These descriptions only give a very brief and vague description of the man that they should be searching for. Another point is that this witness many have not seen correctly, or at all so how accurate would this source be in the first place? The language she uses also does not quite fit the criteria of a woman that is from east chapple, so there may have been so police influence when Elizabeth was questioned.
Source E is not very useful as it is an article written for a local newspaper and therefore the content would be quite bias. The ‘informer’ gives an impression of truth to the reader so the newspaper would be sold. The language used in the article is vulgar as they illustrate that the police where doing nothing. It is a useful question but it shows that the public and media have abused the police. The public abused the police due to the influence the media had on them. While trying to solve a case that was from the beginning onwards very difficult and also being insulted and abused by the public made the investigation really hard to successfully end the case by capturing the murderer.
4.
To help the police with their investigation to find and stop the person that has committed many brutal and violent murders, the police put out notices requesting people with information should come forward as shown in source F. This would have had an unlikely impact on the public, as people would have wanted to get something out of the information they were supplying, despite its urgency and value.
The metropolitan police decided against the use of rewards as stated in source G, as they discovered through good use of it in the past that a ‘reward tended to produce more harm then good.’ With this they meant that they will be getting millions of false reports and evidence by the public and the press in order to get the reward money. But in the end on October the first did eventually offer 500 pounds reward for any information or eyewitness accounts. And another 500 pounds on top from the Lord Mayor showing that he also was desperate to find out that stop the violent murder.
The police sent out 80,000 leaflets and questioned around 2,000 lodgers in order to dig up clues about the killer that they were trying to find. Many men were arrested for acting suspiciously and 76 butchers were also questioned, due to that the many people thought that the murderer had to been a butcher due to his knowledge of were he will find the organs he cut out.
Overall there was not much the police could do to catch the murderer without catching him red handed. Also they did not have much a lot of crime prevention tools that they could have used to capture the killer such as DNA sampling and fingerprints. The police had no real choice or idea in how they should investigate the crimes other than wait and hoping to capture the killer during one of his acts.
5.
In the time of 1888 5 terrifying and violent murders have been committed in a time period of around 3 months. With little evidence left at each murder scene and no decent crime technology available it was nearly impossible for the police at this time to solve such murder crimes.
In order to catch the killer the police had to work with the little evidence they had and the eyewitness accounts to try to find and catch the person responsible in his acts. To help them with the case the police send out 80,000 leaflets around the area east chapple (where the murders have been committed) and questioned around 2,000 lodgers to find out any information that could lead the police to the killer. As well as men being arrested due to suspicious behaviour, 76 butchers and slaughters have been questioned due to the apparent anatomical knowledge of the killer. Not only were theses procedures carried out but also the city of London put out a huge reward of 500 pounds to anyone that could help the police with their investigation. If that was not enough the Lord Mayor showed how desperate he was to find and stop the murderer by adding another 500 pounds on the reward of the police. The metropolitan police, due to their previous experiences, decided against the use of these rewards as it tells us in source G ‘reward tended to produce more harm then good’. Source F is also an example of he notices police put up for the public, requesting to help with coming forward with their knowledge about any of the 5 murders. This shows that the police have put in a lot of effort to find and capture the murder and also how they tried many different ways in which they could get closer of solving the case.
Eyewitnesses who eventually did come forward and proved genuine usually did not provide the most reliable of evidences. For example in source D, the evidence provided by Elizabeth Long was unreliable and very vague. With her type of description together with other unreliable eyewitnesses, putting together a good profile of the murder proved to be difficult.
The women’s habit of being drunk a lot of the times made them very vulnerable and put them in such a state that it would not be a difficult for the person to murder them. It would have also made people less alerted if the women started to scream due to her drunkenness and this could explain why there were so little eyewitnesses. Also it was not unusual for women in their criteria to be approached by strange men. This again explains the little eyewitness accounts the police got and the very vague description the police got if the managed to find someone that saw something. Sources J and I also show dark alleyways in which the bodies were found. This again could explain why no one heard or saw the killer committing his act. The dark and small alleyways were a perfect place for the ripper to kill his victims.
At every murder scene a police doctor was send out to examine the bodies and to make a formal report on what he found. For every murder there was also a coroner that wrote official reports of the bodies and added to that their own opinion to the murders. These professionals would have given an accurate report to the police. The forensic evidence that was available to collect from the murder scene was not collected and examined in great detail due to the lack of technology at that time. They did not have any DNA sampling methods or Fingerprinting methods available to them around the 1880’s, all of these things would have made the police’s life much easier in finding their murderer. This is clearly shown in sources B and C.
Due to the obvious uproar about the Ripper murders and the fact that the police were finding it difficult to get a clear view and description of what exactly happened and who committed murders, the press had a huge effect on the public. The press at that time had the tendency to over exaggerate and come up with stories that send out panic and chaos to the public. Sources A, E and H are examples of the types or articles that were published by the press. Even the ‘Ripper Letters’ have been manipulated or totally made up from the press and send to the police. Source A being a newspaper article is biased and also most likely to been over exaggerated from what the actual truth was. The word ‘startled’ shows the peculiarity of the crimes, however due to the many gangs and violence that were around that time in London it is quite strange and peculiar that the ripper murders stood out so much at that time. Source E is from a informant accusing the police of not listening to what the public has to say but the reliability of the source is very doubtful due to that we do not know if the informant actually existed. Most likely is that some journalist came up with the story to make another headline for his article. The press at this time had a lot of power over the public and could easily influence their readers. They used this to their full advantage and made the people dislike and act against the police force. And this interrupted with the police investigation and got the police into fights with the public. This couldn’t have helped the investigation that already was difficult enough to crack but made even harder by the public and press. Overall the impression is given that the police, due to lack of technology, had only one way of capturing the killer and that was capturing him red handed which left them in a difficult situation.
However source A states ‘ no adequate motive in the shape of plunder can be traced’. This can show that maybe the police were not working hard enough at tracing the killer or doing everything they could to prevent more murders from being committed. Source B and C also show a pattern in the killings, same location, same wounds etc this makes us questions why the actions that the police took couldn’t be better. Source E depicts the police as not doing enough to prevent murders and not taking in information that was provided by the public.
The heads of the two police forces that were around at that time, that were forced to work together due to one of the murders took place at a boundary between them, did not want to work with each other and saw each other more as rivals and competition than allies that worked together. The evidence that they found was not dealt with properly for example the writing on the wall next to the dead body of Catharine Eddowes was cleared away because the person thought that it would cause a uproar among the Jews. This type of careless mistake would have had a great impact on the case. As source I shows the area in which the murders were committed is very small meaning that a mere step up in patrol could have meant that the case could have been closed. One police force, the city of London police, released a reward of 500 pounds yet the metropolitan police did not due to the refusal of the home secretary.
Source F is the ‘appeal’ for information. Again here there is no reward as it was seen to be inappropriate as it could cause more harm than good, eventhough today it is very common for the police to give out rewards for the people who come forward with any information that could end up being useful. No clear description of the murders was given so its therefore ineffective.
In source D some of the words such as ‘complexioned’, ‘deceased’ and ‘foreigner’ would not really be appropriate to a woman, possibly a woman of the town, living in whitechapel. This could represent a weakness in the police for influencing her words as she gave her report the first time making it less accurate. The influence could of come from harsh questioning etc. personally I don’t fully blame the police for not finding the killer. In the 1880’s the police had no idea of how to solve such crimes and neither had the correct technology that would have made it much easier for them to track the killer down. Also the vague witness accounts and the arguments with the other police force have not helped the investigation and probably just made it much more difficult to solve. Maybe even so difficult that it is nearly impossible to solve.
