Ripper

            Senior detectives on the case never agreed on the true total of the Ripper's victims. Most modern experts agree that he claims at least four victims - Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Catharine Eddowes and Mary Kelley. There are strong grounds, however, for adding two more, Martha Tabram and Elizabeth Stride, making a probable tally of five or six, all prostitutes, all slain in the late summer and autumn of 1888.
             Although these crimes are sometimes referred to as the "Whitechapel murders" only two of the six were actually committed in Whitechapel. Two were perpetrated in Spitalfields, one in St. George's-in-the-East and one in the city. Nevertheless, all of the murder sites are within a single square mile in the East End of London. The Ripper's victims were mostly poor, middle-aged women, deprived of male support by broken marriages or bereavement. For such women life was especially hard. Some jobs were seasonal. Not surprisingly, prostitution became an instrument of survival. A police report of 1888 estimated the number of prostitutes working on the streets of the Metropolitan Police's H or Whitechapel Division at 1200 people. For a man with murder and mutilation in mind, a man like Jack the Ripper they were the most vulnerable of targets. James Monroe, the Chief Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police in 1889, understood their plight perfectly: "Scores of these unfortunate women may be seen any night muddled with drink in the streets and alleys, perfectly reckless as to their safety, and only anxious to meet with anyone who will keep them in plying their miserable trade.".
             By moving from one locale to another some modern serial killers have remained at large for years and have claimed far more victims then than the Ripper. But few killers have inspired the degree if fear generated by the Ripper murders and this was partly because they were so concentrated in time and place. At the height of the scare in the autumn of 1888 the inhabitants of the East End, and indeed other parts of London, then the capital of the greatest empire in the world, lived in terror of the lone assassin.