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When Jack the Ripper gave himself up!

When ‘Jack the Ripper’ gave himself up in Wexford.

It was early in the morning when Jack the Ripper gave himself up in Wexford.

At least, that’s who he told the police he was.

The man, about 25-years-of-age according to a report in The Irish Times on March 28th, 1889, had “the appearance of one who is in the habit of working in a steamer or foundry,” and readily confessed to murdering a woman he named as Mary Anne Cooper in London two years previously.

Prison records at the time indicate the anonymous man in question was Arthur Williams, a 33-year-old clerk of no fixed abode and originally from Portsmouth in England.

On his arrest on March 26th, Williams was remanded for eight days. His claims evidently did not hold water, and he was released on the 29th.

The report noted: “The police think that he is misrepresenting the facts.”

The case of Arthur Williams occurred in the months following one of the darkest periods in Britain’s criminal history - the Whitechapel murders.

For a period at the end of 1888, London’s East End was terrorised by an unknown, and still unidentified, serial killer with the moniker ‘Jack the Ripper’.

An unprecedented media frenzy followed.

‘Jack the Ripper’ preyed on women, typically prostitutes. Estimates on the total number of victims vary, but it is widely accepted that five women were brutally murdered by ‘Jack the Ripper’ between August 31st and November 9th, 1888.