Words such as ‘incisions’ and ‘cut’ imply that a knife was used, supporting this in Source B.
Source C states that there was no money found on the body, this can support or conflict with source A. Source A says ‘no adequate motive in the shape of plunder can be traced’. No money on the body could mean that it was stolen or simply that she had none in the first place, in which case it would support Source A.
Source B Says that ‘the body was not dissected’ and ‘there are no meaningless cuts’ this is slightly supported by the description of the cutting of the windpipe in Source C.
Source B and C are both official reports, and the people writing them probably have little reason to lie. This makes them much more dependable and the points which are the same in both are more believable. Source A does not give many details as to what has been committed and does not give many facts making it much less reliable.
- The evidence of Elizabeth Long at the inquest into the death of Annie Chapman consisted of a very vague description of the man she believed to be the Ripper. There is nothing distinguishing about the man. Information she gave such as ‘dark complexioned’ and ‘dark coat’ could easily be due to bad lighting as she probably saw him at night time. As all of the murders were committed at night any descriptions would be very vague as all clothes would appear dark and his features would be distorted. Elizabeth Long was almost certainly on oath at the time but still she may have an ulterior motive and therefore is not incredibly reliable. It would be completely impossible to find the murderer based on this description. This Source helps you understand that it was hard for the police to get a reliable and accurate description.
Source E says that it was the police’s fault for not creating order on the streets at night and that they were warned by the paper’s informant. By not naming the informant it makes the source less reliable not mentioning the fact that it was written in a local newspaper. Newspapers would publish a lot of false information to sell papers and keep people interested. However, the source has some truth in it; for example it mentions the network of narrow, dark and crooked lanes. This is true as there were many small, dark alleyways in Whitechapel. The article also points out the ‘headquarters of infamy’; this is referring to the brothels in Whitechapel. It would certainly not be unusual to see a man with a woman in a dark alley; therefore people would not pay that much attention if they saw the Ripper.
From reading the article it leads one to believe that there was clearly many problems in Whitechapel before the murders but the police did little to prevent such trouble and even after the first murder didn’t take such matters seriously. This source therefore says that it was the police’s fault that the Ripper was able to avoid capture and such sites of ‘evil’ were encouraging such behaviour.
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Source F shows a police leaflet published after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Kate Eddowes. It shows that the police were appealing for witnesses to either of the murders. As there was nothing like CCTV in the 19th Century witnesses are what the police relied upon and leaflets were good ways to appeal for them. The leaflet was issued on the 30th September 1888; this was after the murders of Elizabeth Stride and Kate Eddowes. The police believed this was the third murder committed by the ‘Ripper’. Judging by this source they didn’t take matters seriously enough until there were 3 believed murders. Detectives seem to have decided from their evidence that the murderer was ‘someone residing in the immediate neighbourhood’ though this isn’t necessarily true. One big problem about the leaflet that it gave no description; this could be due to conflicting descriptions or so not to encourage liars.
From Source G you can see that the police wanted to give out rewards to help find the Ripper but the Home Secretary believed that this might affect the validity of information received. People in the Whitechapel area generally weren’t rich and the Home Secretary believed that they would set someone up to get a reward, ruining the case completely.
The police interviewed vast amounts of people in an attempt to find the murderer or some evidence. They interviewed people that had vast anatomical knowledge such as butchers, doctors and people working in abattoirs and slaughter houses. Yet anyone arrested were later released. There were door-to-door inquiries to find out as much as possible.
Police patrols were increased and were criss-crossing Whitechapel at regular intervals. The police took around Bloodhounds for a while but to no avail, and soon discontinued that. The all male police force also tried to disguise some of the officers as prostitutes but this gave no results.
Seeing as there was not such thing as forensics there was little else the police could do, though the case should’ve been more organised. There are many suspicious circumstances surrounding the case.
- The police were to blame for not capturing Jack the Ripper in many ways. They were the only people that could actually catch him and seeing as they didn’t it is basically their fault. Although there was a lot against them at the time. In general they needed to be much more organised. Lots of information and evidence was lost, some has only been found recently. Of course there was no such thing as computers so there was no successful way of keeping and sharing information at the time.
Because one of the murders was committed in Spitalfields another police station got involved. Information was not effectively shared between the two stations. It is also believed that the seniors in the different stations didn’t get on, making things even harder.
The police force was not sufficiently prepared for such cases, they had hardly any training before going on the beat and their jobs were not as serious as dealing with dangerous serial killers. This was mainly due to the fact that there had never been a known serial killer and it was not a phrase used or known. This is backed up by Source A; ‘startled London’ proving the fact that the murders were much of a shock to everyone. More important members of the police force had never before come into contact with anything similar to the Ripper case.
There was one large problem about the case; it was not known and still isn’t definite which murders were committed by the same person. It is not entirely wild to think that none of them were committed by the same person, however there are five widely believed to be committed by ‘Jack the Ripper’. Even if a murderer was caught there would be nothing to link him to all the other murders. As there was no such thing as forensics at the time, the only thing that would allow the police charge someone would be either a confession from the suspect or to catch someone in the act. This was virtually impossible.
The police made a large effort to interview people and find witnesses. This is shown in Source F by the leaflet appealing for witnesses. However, the statements and descriptions were all very vague, unreliable and contradictory; showed by Elizabeth Long’s description in Source D. There was not much the police could do about this though. They carried out door-to-door inquiries but to no avail. They decided to interview people who specialised in dealing with bodies, such as slaughterers. This is even though Source B states ‘no mere slaughterer of animals could have carried out these operations’. Nonetheless, in many sources there is a big focus on the need of anatomical knowledge. Many people were arrested but due to not enough evidence they were all released.
The police tried to use newspapers to find witnesses but this only caused problems, witnesses’ stories were sometimes gained from the newspapers and it is possible that there were copycat murderers.
Newspapers caused a lot of problems in the investigation. They weren’t particularly interested in solving the case but just wanted to keep the public interested and buying papers. Sources A, E and H are all articles from newspapers and all have few facts but just speculation. The police shouldn’t have let themselves and the investigation be so controlled by the press.
The police increased the number of police on the streets and introduced bloodhounds for a while; policemen even went undercover as prostitutes in an attempt for more information.
The area of the murders did not help the police. Whitechapel was a red-light district; screams were not uncommon and therefore went unnoticed. The area had a network of narrow streets as you can see from the map in Source I and as it is written in Source E. The houses were close together and most of the sites of the murder were out of the way as you can see in Source J. By performing the crimes in such an area at night time it is not hard to understand why it went unnoticed. Jack the Ripper was quite clever when killing his victims; he cut them so that their blood would not splatter him, leaving him clean.
The police could have done so much more to make their investigation successful, but there was an incredible amount against them. Source H speaks of how cleverly planned the murders were. As well as this there was no possibility of using the techniques we rely upon nowadays such as DNA, fingerprints and CCTV. Nevertheless, as Source E mentions, little was done by the police to improve safety on the streets in Whitechapel and clear away the brothels.
The police force were clearly not prepared and did not expect such evil acts and wrongly estimated the severity of the case and therefore didn’t do enough to prevent more murders. By the time they did realise, it was too late and nothing else could be done.