Why were the police unable To catch Jack the ripper?

Why were the police unable

To catch Jack the ripper?

The jack the ripper investigation was always going to be a very difficult with the limitations of the 19th century police force. However, the difficulty increased with the numerous false starts and red herrings that police faced in 1888.

The first major false start in the Whitechapel murders was the investigation of ‘leather Apron’. It occurred during the search of the 1st victims (Mary Anne Nichols AKA ‘Polly’ Nichols) killer when a newspaper called ‘The star’ released reports of a bizarre man named ‘Leather Apron’ he apparently forced prostitutes to pay him or he beat them. The star also claimed he was a Jewish slipper maker.

The police arrested a man known as ‘Leather Apron’ who had previously been arrested and prosecuted for stabbings. It seemed they’d found there killer. But it turned out ‘Leather Apron’ had alibis for all the murders. The police needed to look for new leads

The people of Whitechapel began to panic they looked for a scapegoat and found the growing Jewish communities in east London as their target. The man known as ‘Leather Apron’ who beat prostitutes was also a Jew. A witness to the Annie Chapman aka ‘Dark Annie’ pointed to a foreigner (this was the common term used to describe Jews.) These two facts and the many rumours flying around London at the time were created by a distinctly anti-Semitic atmosphere in the area of Whitechapel. The police received hundreds of accusations mostly pointing at Jewish shop keepers in Whitechapel which ...

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So far nobody was able to accurately identify the ‘man’ seen talking to the victim before they died. There were man description which hadn’t helped the police narrow down the search. Every witness claiming to the victims talking to a man who may have been a the killer had given a different ‘ripper’ description. This meant the could not create a clear image of what the ‘ripper’ looked like. Again unreliable sources slowed down the process.

It was around this time that the ‘Jewish message’ appeared. it was found on Goulston street an hour after the Catherine Eddows murder and read:

“The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing”

The message doesn’t have a clear meaning but is ethier an extremely valuable piece of information or a ingenious decoy to get police off the ‘ripper’ scent. There was also a number of letter claiming to be written by the ‘ripper’ one even including half a human kidney the letter as indicates that the ‘ripper’ ate the other half. Most of these are fakes but some could be real this uncertainty also slowed the ‘ripper’ investigation.

The police were criticised by the press for not capturing the ‘ripper’. Although they tried there best with there vast amount of fake sightings and little resources and they followed every lead they got both conventional and unconventional. They also got male (as there were no female) police officers to dress as women to act as a decoy for the ‘ripper’. They also went to lodging house and interviewed over 2,000 lodgers. They also interrogated sailors, butchers and slaughterers. They also used blood hounds to track the ‘ripper’ although this was abandoned due to unreliability.

In conclusion I believe the main factor as to why the poilice were unable to catch ‘jack the ripper’ as largely down to the presses intervention and the people of Whitechapel feeding the police unreliable information which distracted their attention to pointless investigations which may have in turn lead to them over looking a vital piece of information. Also the police didn’t have the resources necessary to catch the ripper.

By Arran O’Reilly