February 2009 Archives

No murder case before or since has captured the public imagination in quite the same way as the Jack The Ripper killings.
Brutal, ritualistic, depraved, the murder spree enthralled Victorian London with the sheer scale of its cruelty and disregard for human suffering.
In 1888 the capital was in a state of morbid fascination as a vicious killer stalked the streets of East London's poorest areas, seizing prostitutes and subjecting them to inhuman acts of torture.
This was the first serial killing to take place in the age of readily available newspapers, whose editors revelled in the sordid details of the Ripper murders, whipping the public into a frenzy.
The more vice girls that went missing, the more the Ripper's legacy grew, and the harder Scotland Yard found it to track their man.
Newspapers took a perverse pleasure in the failure of detectives, who turned up at several of the grisly crime scenes just moments after "Jack" had fled.
Then, as suddenly as they had begun, the string of killings stopped.
With no arrests, no real suspects and a total lack of evidence, the police were forced to admit they had no solution to the case, leaving one of the most notorious murder sprees of all time unsolved.
As the years have drawn on, conspiracy theorists have speculated on the true identity of the killer. Clearly this was not the work of a member of the vast economic underclass that had developed in East London.
The Ripper was smart, ruthless and cunning.
While a number of suspects have been put forward over the past century, it is the possibility of a Royal connection that has truly excited the conspiracy community. If a Royal was involved, many say that a vast network of freemasons and members of the so-called "Illuminati" could have protected his identity.
So could the Ripper really have been Prince Eddy, the heir to the British throne?
Historians claim it is impossible, but the dark side of the ill-fated Prince's character is well documented, leading some theorists to maintain that he was the man behind one of the most heinous crimes in British history.