Tuesday, 5 January 2016

Culture's project

For this subject, we had to do a project about something related to the British or American culture and my group and I decided to deal with serial killers. My part of the work was Jack the Ripper and his investigation, so I'm going to talk a bit about him.

Jack the Ripper, also known as “the Whitechapel Murderer” and “Leather Apron”, is a notorious unidentified serial killer whose victims were female prostitutes who lived and worked in Whitechapel in 1888. Its name, “Jack the Ripper”, comes from a letter written by someone who claimed to be the murderer. There were four letters supposedly from the murderer. One of them, “From Hell”, contained half of a human kidney from one of the victims.

Up to 1891, there were eleven brutal murders in Whitechapel but the police investigation was unable to connect all of them to Jack. The most likely to be connected were the “canonical five” who were Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, all of them mutilated except Elizabeth.

The murders were never solved and the legends surrounding Jack the Ripper became a mixture of folklore, research and pseudohistory. The study and analysis of the Ripper cases is called “ripperology”. There are more than one hundred theories about his identity and he has inspired many works of fiction.

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