The episode features historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook discussing suspects in the Jack the Ripper case, examining theories ranging from police investigations to modern conspiracy theories.

They analyze the 1888 Whitechapel murders that occurred within one square mile of London's East End between August and November, killing five to six women with escalating brutality.

The discussion covers witness descriptions of a white man of average or below-average height in his late 20s or 30s, wearing shabby genteel clothing and possibly a peaked cap or deerstalker hat, who struck between midnight and 6 AM on weekends and bank holidays.

Philip Sugden's Jack the Ripper serves as the definitive reference throughout, with the hosts ultimately proposing their own theories about the killer's identity and why the murders stopped.

The Supernatural and Celebrity Suspects

The earliest theory appeared in The Advertisement on November 24, 1888, claiming Catherine Eddowes was murdered by a medieval curse from a 16th-century monastery on Mitre Square where monks had committed crimes

Famous Victorians accused included William Gladstone (three-time Prime Minister who rescued prostitutes), Lewis Carroll (based on supposed anagrams in his writings), W.G. Grace (the bearded cricketer-doctor), and Lord Randolph Churchill (Winston's father, who died of syphilis)

Joseph Merrick (the Elephant Man) was proposed despite being "a famously kind and gentle man" living in the London Hospital with a distinctive appearance that would have been immediately noticed

Boston Corbett, who shot John Wilkes Booth and castrated himself after an encounter with prostitutes, escaped from a Kansas asylum in 1888 but had no evidence linking him to Whitechapel

Prince Eddie and the Royal Conspiracy

Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, was first proposed as the Ripper in 1970 by Dr. Thomas Stowell in The Criminologist, identifying him only as "S" but making his identity obvious through family details

The theory claimed Prince Eddie contracted syphilis in the Caribbean, went mad, killed prostitutes for revenge, and died raving in a locked chamber at Sandringham in 1890—but he actually died of flu in 1892

Prince Eddie had ironclad alibis: he was in Yorkshire with Viscount Downe during Polly Nichols' murder, at cavalry barracks in York for Annie Chapman, and in Scotland with Queen Victoria for the double murder of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes

Stephen Knight's 1976 book refref-book-jack-the-ripper--the-final-solutionJack the Ripper The Final Solution proposed that Prince Eddie secretly married Catholic working-class girl Annie Crook (played by Joanna Page from Gavin and Stacey in From Hell), creating a constitutional crisis under the 1701 Act of Settlement

Knight claimed Mary Jane Kelly witnessed the wedding and blackmailed Lord Salisbury's government with her friends, leading to Masonic murders by Sir William Gull—who was 71, obese, had suffered a stroke in 1887, and wasn't actually a Freemason

The theory required Gull to kidnap women in a carriage, dissect them inside, and throw bodies into narrow courtyards and alleyways physically impossible for a carriage to access

Walter Sickert and the Artist Theory

Walter Sickert, a brilliant post-impressionist painter born in Germany in 1860, was first proposed as the Ripper in 1959 by Donald McCormick and championed by crime novelist Patricia Cornwell, who bought 30 Sickert paintings for her research

Sickert painted refref-book-jack-the-ripper--the-final-solutionJack the Ripper's Bedroom in 1906 at his Mornington Crescent lodging house after his landlady claimed the previous tenant was the Ripper because "he used to go out a lot at night"

His 1908 Camden Town Murder series depicted a clothed man standing over a naked woman on a bed, inspired by prostitute Emily Dimmock's murder—critics believe Sickert painted the pictures first and added the sensational title later for publicity

Sickert wrote about painting Venetian prostitutes in 1903: "These pretty, obliging little models who laugh and unembarrassedly be themselves while posing like angels. It is an uninterrupted joy to paint them"—hardly the words of a serial killer, according to analyst Wolf van der Linden

Patricia Cornwell's DNA testing of a stamp licked by Sickert matched DNA from Ripper letters, but the match applied to as much as 10% of the population, and the letters are likely hoaxes

Sickert lived until 1942 and his biographer Matthew Sturgis confirmed he was in France for at least four of the murders, making it implausible he committed escalating killings in 1888 and then stopped completely

Inspector Aberline's Suspects

Aberline proposed the Jill the Ripper theory after witnesses claimed to see Mary Jane Kelly at 8-9 AM when she was already dead—suggesting a woman dressed in Kelly's clothes made the escape

A midwife would naturally be out late at night delivering babies without suspicion

Midwives dealt with blood regularly, so bloodstained clothing wouldn't be unusual

Midwives possessed anatomical knowledge, particularly of the uterus and reproductive organs that were targeted

Female serial killers are rare and don't typically target other women

George Chapman (real name Severin Kłosowski) was a Polish surgeon's apprentice who trained at Praga Hospital in Warsaw, arrived in London in late 1887-early 1888, and worked as a barber in Cable Street near the murder sites

Chapman was single during the murders, of medium height with a moustache, wore peaked caps, and had surgical training

He later murdered three women (Mary Spink, Bessie Taylor, Maud Marsh) using tartar emetic poison in small doses over time

He attacked his wife Lucy with a knife in Jersey City in 1889

The major flaw: the drastic change from frenzied evisceration to slow poisoning is psychologically implausible for serial killers

"The biggest problem, the massive difference in the modus operandi... is it plausible that you'll go from that to a decade later, sort of pretending to marry women and poisoning them slowly" - Dominic

Melville McNaughton's 1894 Memorandum

Sir Melville McNaughton, Assistant Commissioner of Metropolitan Police (1903-1913), wrote the most famous document in Ripper history in February 1894 to refute claims that Thomas Cutbush was the killer

McNaughton was upper-class, attended Eton, was youngest son of the East India Company chairman

He introduced fingerprinting to British policing in 1905 and directed the Dr. Crippen investigation

Two copies exist: an official Scotland Yard memorandum and a personal draft with more opinions

McNaughton wrote: "No one ever saw the Whitechapel murderer. Many homicidal maniacs were suspected, but no shadow of proof"—refuting claims that police knew the killer's identity and kept it secret

Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-Jewish barber born in Kwadrawa, Poland in 1865, was described by McNaughton as having "a great hatred of women, especially the prostitute class, and had strong homicidal tendencies" after being removed to an asylum in March 1889

Kosminski emigrated to London in the 1880s fleeing Tsarist pogroms, lived in Whitechapel, worked occasionally as a barber

December 1889: arrested for having an unlicensed dog

Doctor's report: "He declares that he is guided and his movements altogether controlled by an instinct... he refuses food from others because he is told to do so and eats out of the gutter"

Case notes describe him as "lazy, apathetic, passive"—only one mention of violence when he "took up a chair and attempted to strike the charge attendant"

He died in 1919 after years in workhouses and asylums

Russell Edwards claimed in 2014 that DNA from Catherine Eddowes' shawl proved Kosminski was the Ripper, but Philip Sugden called it "the worst" DNA evidence—the shawl's provenance was unverified and many people had touched it

Montague John Druitt was McNaughton's preferred suspect: "a doctor of about 41 years of age" whose body was found in the Thames on December 31, 1888, seven weeks after the Miller's Court murder, having been in the water for a month

Actually a barrister, not a doctor—attended Winchester and New College Oxford, excellent cricketer and MCC member

Worked part-time on the Western Circuit in Hampshire, taught at a boarding school in Blackheath

Local newspaper: "He was well known and much respected in the neighbourhood... a barrister of bright talent... had a promising future before him"

McNaughton theorized: "The murderer's brain gave way altogether after his awful glut in Miller's court and he immediately committed suicide"

Druitt's mother had been confined to an asylum in July 1888, possibly explaining his suicide through hereditary depression rather than guilt over murders—serial killers don't typically commit suicide from shame

Druitt spent most of summer 1888 playing cricket in Dorset and Blackheath, making it implausible he could leave Whitechapel after a 3:40 AM murder, cross the Thames, shave, change into cricket whites, and open the batting by 11:30 AM

Michael Ostrog, described by McNaughton as "a mad Russian doctor and a convict and unquestionably a homicidal maniac... habitually cruel to women" who "carried about with him surgical knives," was actually a kleptomaniac con artist with no history of violence

Born in Russian Empire in early 1830s, first appeared in Oxford records in 1863 stealing from Oriel and New College chapels

Posed as Count Sobieski, escaped Polish nobleman from Siberian exile, conning people in Bishop Stortford and Cambridge

At Tunbridge Wells posed as son of the King of Poland, got the parade band to play the Polish national anthem

At Eton stole random items over months: silver cups, coat, Spanish dictionary from students and teachers

Only violent incident: resisting arrest at Fox and Goose Inn, Burton-on-Trent

The Police Gazette issued a notice calling Ostrog "this dangerous man" because he failed to report on bail, but he was almost six feet tall (too tall for witness descriptions), in his mid-50s (too old), and had no history of sexual assault

A man using Ostrog's alias the Grand Guidon was arrested in France in summer 1888 and imprisoned for two years for petty crime, providing him with an alibi

Modern Theories and DNA Failures

James Maybrick, a Liverpool cotton merchant who died in May 1889, became a suspect in 1992 when an anonymous diary emerged claiming to have committed five Whitechapel murders plus two more

Maybrick's wife Florence was convicted of poisoning him with arsenic, though acquitted in 1904 upon re-examination

The diary claimed Maybrick saw his wife with her lover in the Whitechapel district of Liverpool and killed prostitutes in revenge

Scientific tests on the Victorian book and ink were inconclusive

A Victorian pocket watch emerged in 1993 inscribed "J. Maybrick" with the initials of five victims, produced by "an unemployed scrap metal dealer in Liverpool who claimed he'd been given it the year before by a mate in a pub"

The dealer confessed to faking the watch but later retracted his confession—the diary and watch contain "all kinds of mistakes and fallacies and errors" but Maybrick still appears on suspect lists

Francis Tumblety, an Irish-American quack doctor born around 1833, was mentioned by Detective Chief Inspector John Littlechild in a 1919 letter as a suspect

Sold products like "Dr. Morse's Indian root pills," claimed to be former Union Army surgeon, arrested for parading in fake military uniform and medals

Arrested in connection with Abraham Lincoln's assassination due to his shady character

Wore "Ruritanian military uniform" with spiked Prussian helmet and a moustache "twice the width of his own head"

American journalist Charles Dunham claimed Tumblety boasted of collecting "the uteruses of a dozen women in jars" and hated women, but Dunham himself had 12 different identities and fabricated stories

Tumblety was arrested by the Met on November 16, 1888 for indecency, broke bail, fled to France under a false name, and died of a heart attack in 1903—the Met did not pursue extradition despite American press reports

Tumblety was 5'10" (too tall), had no evidence of familiarity with the East End, and was almost certainly gay—"gay serial killers tend to target men, young men. They almost never target women"

The Knacker's Yard Theory

Tom Holland proposes the killer was a slaughterman from Barber's Horse Slaughterhouse on Winthrop Street, which ran parallel to Buck's Row where Polly Nichols was found—the site is now under the Elizabeth Line at Whitechapel station

The knacker's yard was owned by London's largest purveyor of knackering, processing about 2,000 horses annually according to an 1879 report

Slaughtermen had to dismember horse bodies, boil bones to extract fat for axle grease and cricket bat oil, and use bones for cutlery and carriage interiors

Three slaughtermen (James Mumford, Henry Tompkins, Charles Breton) worked at Barber's from 8-9 PM Thursday to 4:20 AM Friday—around when Polly's body was found

The slaughtermen left the yard at midnight and returned around 1 AM, precisely when Polly was murdered—"someone who would be absolutely adept at cutting up a carcass" was leaving work at the murder time

If the killer lived eastward, he would have walked down Hanbury Street—where Annie Chapman was murdered next, suggesting a pattern following a slaughterman's route home from work

"Folk wisdom" suggests people who torture animals in youth often become serial killers—a knacker's yard would be "an obvious career for someone growing up in the East End" with such tendencies

A 2009 criminology study found that "people who work in abattoirs are statistically more likely to commit violent crimes"—supporting the slaughterman theory

Dominic Sandbrook agrees the killer was likely "a butcher, somebody who's used to wielding a knife" with anatomical knowledge, noting doctors were divided about how precise that knowledge was, suggesting "probably not a doctor"

Why the Murders Stopped

The hosts propose three possible explanations for why the escalating murders suddenly ceased after Mary Jane Kelly in November 1888

Sandbrook suggests the killer "was perhaps arrested for some other violent crime and was put away," though acknowledges police would likely have noticed such a person

Holland proposes the killer died in the 1889-1892 flu pandemic that killed Prince Eddie: "I think it's perfectly possible this is somebody who was killed in what is a colossal pandemic. And just the death goes unnoticed"

Both historians agree the killer was likely "somebody completely anonymous" from the East End—a working man in his late 20s or 30s with a moustache, wearing a deerstalker or peaked cap, who knew the area intimately

The killer struck only on weekends and bank holidays between midnight and 6 AM, suggesting someone with regular weekday employment who was unmarried or had arrangements allowing nighttime absence

Charles Lechmere, who discovered Polly Nichols' body and gave his name as "Charles Cross" at the inquest, remains a possibility—his route to work from Bethnal Green to Covent Garden passed through the murder sites