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Picture of Buck's Row Whitechapel in London's East End (now Durward St) - site of Jack the Ripper's first murder on 31 August 1888. Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols' body was discovered 3 metres back from the corner of the tall brick building.

Take a Ripper virtual tour from the first murder scene. Click on the map below to view all 5 murder scenes and other key locations in the hunt for the world's first recognised serial killer.

Buck's Row Whitechapel

Jack the Ripper's London 1888


View Jack the Ripper Walk, Whitechapel, Greater London UK in a larger map

This link will take you to the key points in London where Jack the Ripper carried out his 5 murders
over 71 days from 31 August 1888 to 9 November 1888. You can use this map to make your own Jack the
Ripper walk around London or to trace the movements of the Whitechapel killer whose identity has
never been established.

Jack the Ripper revealed at last—by great-grandson of the cop who tracked him down

The East London Advertiser reports:

The Jack the Ripper ‘industry’ got a boost on the 120th anniversary of his first acknowledged murder.

The great-grandson of the police chief in charge of the 1888 Whitechapel Murders arrived at the Ripper exhibition at the Museum in Docklands in East London—just before the 120th anniversary of the murder Mary Ann Nichols, a prostitute known as ‘Polly,’ believed by many to be his first victim.

He arrived with evidence from his Victorian ancestor revealing the Ripper’s true identity.

Nevill Swanson visits Jack the Ripper exhibition in
London and (inset) the main suspect

Jack the Ripper was never caught and his identity has remained a mystery for 120 years, feeding a whole ‘industry’ that has evolved worldwide with ‘Ripperologists’ keen to tell us who he really was.

One of the strong theories re-emerged this week was when Nevill Swanson, great-grandson of Chief Inspector Donald Swanson, turned up at the museum in Canary Wharf to see the exhibition before it closes in November.

“My great-grandfather knew who Jack the Ripper was,” Nevill told the East London Advertiser.

“He solved the case—but police couldn’t prosecute because the only witness who could identify the killer in a court of law wouldn’t testify.

”Donald Swanson scribbled who he knew to be Jack the Ripper in the margin of a copy of the memoirs of Sir Robert Anderson, Assistant Metropolitan Police Commissioner at the time of the Whitechapel Murders, in a chapter that just referred to the main suspect, but not by name.

“The suspect was Kosminsky,” Swanson pencilled in.Aaron Kosminsky was a Polish immigrant living in Whitechapel who had been ‘identified’ by another Polish emigre, who then refused to take the witness stand.

“The police knew the case would collapse in court,” Swanson’s great-grandson added.

“He knew Kosminsky would get away with it—so he had him committed to an asylum instead.

“There were no more murders after that."

It was Nevill’s father who uncovered the margin notes from the family possessions when Nevill’s great aunt—daughter of Chief Inspector Swanson—died in 1978.

The book with the margin notes was left to Nevill’s father.

But the story got buried for several years after he sold the rights to the News of the World in a deal worth £1,000, Nevill remembers.

For some reason, the notes were never published.

It wasn’t until 2001—some 113 years after the Whitechapel Murders—that the Kosminsky theory finally emerged.

“My father died in 2001 and the book with the margin notes came down to me,” Nevill added.

“I knew the significance of the notes and have since loaned the book to Scotland Yard’s Black Museum."

It is a strong and compelling theory—but would spoil the ‘Ripper Industry’ if even this was not challenged by rival theories over the Ripper’s identity.

The marginalia was probably added some time after 1910, and Anderson wouldn’t have known anything that Swanson hadn’t told him, a reader has informed us.

Martin Fido was the person who identified Kosminsky by going through asylum records.

This week, the Australians bowled their own theory to stump the Ripperology world with a claim that it wasn’t Kosminsky at all—but an immigrant named Walter Thomas Porriott who is now buried in a cemetery in Brisbane.

The Brisbane Times claims that Porriott, another suspect on Scotland Yard’s list, was the real Jack the Ripper.

Porriott was living at Limehouse in East London at the time, just two miles from Whitechapel.

He was a convicted killer, a conman, bigamist and quack doctor known to hate prostitutes, the paper insists.

The murders ended as soon as Porriott emigrated in 1888.

He died in Brisbane in 1952, some 62 years later.

But there’s more... Members of the renowned Whitechapel Society—dedicated to research into East London’s Victorian and Edwardian society and the 1888 Whitechapel Murders—hold a ‘21st century public investigation’ at the Museum in Docklands this Saturday (September 6), where the most comprehensive Ripper exhibition ever has been staged all summer.

They are promising “fresh photographic evidence” when the ‘investigation’ begins at 3pm.

Three authors are putting their theories to the public, Trevor Marriott, Bill Beadle (the society’s chairman) and Frogg Moody. Ripperologists, of course, are a determined breed, determined to keep the fires of the ‘industry’ burning with different theories—and doubtless will continue to keep them burning for the next 120 years.


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Is Australia's Walter Porriott Jack the Ripper?



Channel 9 Australia - Monday 15 September 2008.
The Today Program examines
the two possible
Australian connections
to Jack the Ripper -
Walter Porriott and Frederick Bailey Deeming.



There has been intense recent media speculation in Australia that the grave of Walter Porriott in Brisbane's Toowong Cemetery is the final resting place of Jack the Ripper.


Ripperologists and historians Paul Tully and Jack Sim appeared on the Channel 9 Today program around Australia on 15 September 2008 to explore the possibility that Porriott - who left London for Australia on the day of the last Ripper murder on 9 November 1888 - was the Butcher of Whitechapel.

Paul Tully and Jack Sim are not convinced that Walter Porriott is Jack the Ripper and rate the likelihood as "exceedingly low", principally because Porriott's modus operandi as a criminal conman, impersonator and fraudster is quite different from the modus operandi of Jack the Ripper.

But the Porriott theory - first raised by his own family in 1997 - has never been disproved and therefore cannot be totally dismissed, with Porriott remaining a suspect in the East End killings.




Do you have a theory on who

Jack the Ripper really was?
Email: RipperAustralia@gmail.com

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Jack the Ripper - were the victims' organs stolen later?

The following story has appeared on the news wires this week:


"Jack the Ripper may have committed his first murder 25 years earlier than previously thought, it has been claimed.

An investigation by retired homicide detective Trevor Marriott has also suggested that the notorious 19th century serial killer did not, in fact, remove internal organs from two of his victims.

Mr Marriott, who will present his findings in a lecture at London's Docklands Museum, has uncovered case files on the murder of a London prostitute in 1863 which he believes fits the Ripper's "modus operandi" - a quarter of a century before the first official Ripper case.
"




It is highly unlikely that Jack the Ripper started his life of crime in 1863. He would have been a very youthful serial killer. However, the possibility that the victims' organs were removed during subsequent post mortem is a new angle deserving of serious investigation.


Do you have a theory on who
Jack the Ripper really was?
Email: RipperAustralia@gmail.com

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