An enormous halo of mystery still surrounds today one of the most famous murderers in history. Who was? Why did he kill his victims?
The end of the 19th century. England is the most powerful nation on Earth, and London, the greatest city in the world. Even without knowing it, this is something that any traveler can intuit at a glance. The towers of the Westminster Parliament stand proudly to speak of British political dominance, just as the City's banks control international trade.
Meanwhile, the Times reports on the amusements of the aristocracy in everything from music halls to fox-hunting parties. To keep the peace, the Navy rules the seas and the admired British police force "reveals, on sight, the splendor of the Empire". From Buckingham Palace, Queen Victoria crowns the age of greatest brilliance and power in the history of England.
However, not all is glitter in that England. And to prove it, it is not necessary to go to the coal mines or the "satanic looms" of Manchester. Not far from the elegance of the West End, there is still an area in London that is "unexplored like Timbuktu". It is the East End and, within the East End, Whitechapel is the place where misery touches bottom. We are talking about a maze of alleys flooded by the foul-smelling fumes of the Thames. Of an underworld where disease, alcoholism and prostitution wreak havoc among its eighty thousand souls.
Of a neighborhood whose overcrowded houses seem to lean menacingly on whoever gathers the courage to walk in its shadow. Whitechapel is the London that the rest of London does not want to see. But, in the autumn of 1888, all England would eventually turn its eyes to this slum of ill repute. For Whitechapel was to be the sinister setting for the crimes of Jack the Ripper. Jack the Ripper may not have been the most deadly of killers, but he may well have been one of the cruelest and - without a doubt - the most famous of them all.
Maybe his name still evokes in us that fear that only a few steps in the dark, the gleam of a sudden knife in a lonely street can provoke. Maybe some criminals were never caught, but he had to be given an alias because his identity was not even captured. It may be, finally, that "the crimes of Whitechapel" shook the well-to-do foundations of Victorian society and revealed the existence of a different, humiliated and poor Britain. However, these explanations are not enough to clarify why, more than one hundred and twenty-five years later, the figure of the Ripper has become a legend; why books and more books continue to appear about his crimes; why there are magazines specialized in studying his profile or why research has even given name to a subject, "ripperology", halfway between science and mere speculation.
The answer is simple: if he had been caught, Jack the Ripper would have ceased to interest us long ago. But it so happens that, so long after, what we know about him is essentially the same as what they knew in his time: nothing. Nothing certain, nothing certain, absolutely nothing. Therefore, no one should be surprised that, with so many mysteries surrounding the Ripper, new hypotheses about his identity appear every few months.
There have been for all tastes and all fantasies, as can be seen with a fact: if for some the Ripper was nothing less than a prominent figure of the Royal House, others have postulated that the murderer was a gorilla escaped from the zoo.
Between the two extremes, the cast of suspects will range from people of such merit as Lewis Carroll (the author of Alice in Wonderland) to poor people like a London shoemaker, whose only sin was to go through the streets with the tools of his trade.
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