Ad-Horr-able History: Jack the Ripper

Hey there boys and girls!  Today we are going travel in our imaginations to the Victorian Age and learn about the most famous English serial Killer:

Jack the Ripper

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Now boys and girls, Lets all close our eyes and imagine its the 1880’s and we’re in London….Now that’s in England!

Come along, and lets visit a little area in the East London called White Chapel!

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Now contrary to the name, White Chapel was very dirty and filled with immigrants.  You see, the city of London was overrun with the dirty, poor and destitute from all over the world because their own homes were no fun.   Also White chapel was  filled with  families living in spaces no bigger than your bathroom at home.

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awwwwww, how sad.

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Because jobs were scarce women had to resort to Prostitution!

That’s when a woman will nap with a man for money!

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One early morning on August 31st, a prostitute by the name of Mary Ann Nichols ,42, was heading home from a night of napping and drinking lots and lots of root beer.  At 6 Am her body was found  in an alley with her throat cut, abdomen  lacerated,

…that’s a big word for violently sliced open:)

and her entrails ripped out. Mary was then dragged to the alley and placed on her back with her legs bent and open, just like when she would nap with men!

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Days past and the inspectors of Scotland Yard were already interviewing her estranged husband when on September 8, 1888, the body of Annie Chapman was found!

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YEEEEEEAAAAAY!!!!!

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Annie was also a Prostitute in her mid-forties and looooooved root beer.

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Now can you guess the murderers M.O yet?

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if you said alcoholic older prostitutes,YOU ARE RIGHT!  please award yourself two stars!

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Now Annie Chapman was found in the backyard of a house and against a fence.   her body, too, was placed with on her back with her legs bent and open with her throat violently cut left to right and her tongue was swollen indicating she was strangled before her throat was cut.  She was also disemboweled consistent with the previous murder.  If the both women were  disemboweled, what does ‘disembowel’ mean?

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`That’s right!  When you take out someone’s entrails!

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Whats different about Annie is not only was she disemboweled but her  uterus,

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that’s where the stork leaves baby brothers and sisters:),

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and its appendages with the upper portion of the vagina and the posterior two thirds of the bladder, had been entirely removed.

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Now its important to bring up the fact that these murders are done with a steady hand and with a knowledge of human anatomy.  What that means is its hard for an uneducated to accurately find all the  organs that the killer had removed from the women.  The only kind of person who could have done such precision work would be…

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a surgeon!

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or a very  knowledgeable butcher.  Also the murderer must have some extreme hate towards women, possibly being abused as a child by his mother.  This made the search for the killer very difficult because smart people don’t usually commit crimes…

Except when your mommies and daddies send you to bed without dinner of course;).

Now weeks go by with many people being questioned but nothing is pinned down until September 30th when the killer strikes again!

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OH NO!

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The bodies of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes are found dead having been murdered 45 minutes apart.  Elizabeth Stride was found with her throat cut but none of her organs were removed, suggesting that someone had interrupted the ritual before it was accomplished.  45 minutes later the killer found Catherine Eddowes and slit her throat and had her face mutilated

That’s a fun way of saying “hacked to bits”.

And of course her intestines were removed , with  part of her colon missing as well as her left kidney.

This caused much panic in the streets because no one likes to be murdered.  But what caused more  scariness, was the letters that the killer sent the police and papers.  Most were written with poor grammar and signed “Jack the Ripper”.  The most famous was written with the return address being, “From Hell” and accompanied with half of Catherine’s kidney.  Jack stated he had “eaten the other half”

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EEEEEEEEWWWWWW!!!

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That’s right, boys and girls, kidney is gross.  Especially in pie.

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Weeks pass again with no new clues for who Jack the Ripper was and finally the body of Mary Kelly,

or what was left of it;),

was found.

She was discovered in her bed hacked to pieces, with her breasts, uterus, intestines, and most of her face removed.  She was unrecognizable and her throat was cut all the way to the spine.  She was also placed in the classic Jack the Ripper fashion on her bed,  naked but with her limbs  removed and her heart missing.

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Now that’s not very nice.

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The sheer brutality of the murder brought media attention from around the world.  Police searched desperately for clues but the murders stopped entirely, leaving the question: Who was Jack the Ripper?

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Who do YOU think Jack the Ripper was?

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If you said  Montague John Druitt, you are  right!  please award yourself two gold stars!:)

A former surgeon who was known to hate his mother and women, Montague’s own family  called  him “sexually insane” and that they “had little doubt that he was the murderer”. Eye witnesses also noted seeing many of the victims with a “mustachioed genteel man” before their deaths matching his discription.   Conveniently he committed suicide in December when the murders stopped saying,
“Since Friday I felt I was going to be like mother, and the best thing for me was to die. ”

Though there is no proof and other hypothesis exist, this one seems the closest

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Now, boys and girls, did you have fun learning?

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