JACK THE RIPPER - A Right Royal Conspiracy?

The Metropolitan Police archive lists 11 victims of the unsolved "Whitechapel Murders" between 1888 and 1891.
Emma Smith, Martha Tabram, Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, Mary Jane Kelly and Rose Mylett were all found dead between April and December 1888. In July 1889 cops discovered the body of Alice McKenzie and just two months later stumbled across an unknown female torso thought to be the handiwork of the Ripper.
The body of the final victim, Frances Coles, was found stashed under a railway arch on Friday 13 February 1891.
All of the women had their throats slit, while only the corpses of Stride and Mylett escaped vile mutilations.
Both Chapman and Eddowes had their uterus' ripped from their bodies by the crazed killer, while the ritualistic slaying of Mary Kelly was so stomach-churning that even the blood thirsty press baulked at reporting the grim details.
On 27 September 1888, just three days before the double murder of Stride and Eddowes, the Central London News Agency received a detailed letter purporting to be from the killer.
Describing his blood lust and the horrifying scenes of his crimes, the writer signed off as "Jack The Ripper" giving a name to the beast stalking London's streets, and creating a legend that would last for more than a century.
In the aftermath of the Stride and Eddowes slayings, cops discovered a piece of graffiti, scrawled on a wall just above a scrap of bloodied apron from one of the victims. It read: "The Juwes are the men that will not be blamed for nothing".
Investigators took it as an attempt to direct them towards the growing Jewish immigrant population of London. Historians are split on whether it was written by the Ripper or was simply the work of angry locals bent on rioting against their new neighbours.
The list of official suspects was long, with any gentleman visiting the red light district of Whitechapel during the killings liable to be hauled in front of detectives and forced to explain himself.
However, the official story ends there, not one of these 11 killings was ever solved, and no-one was prosecuted for the Whitechapel murders. With the Police unable to bring about a conviction, conspiracy theorists have been left to fill in the gaps.

Almost immediately, the Ripper case spawned hundreds of theories and suspects.
Religious zealots were convinced that an evil demon was loose in the sinful streets of East London, local residents angry at the influx of Jewish immigrants were sure these newcomers were to blame, while those who read every gory detail were of the opinion that a doctor or surgeon must be behind the eviscerations and torture.
From this latter group emerged the theory that Dr Francis Tumblety an American quack, who was arrested in November 1888 for gross indecency, and fled the country days later after buying his way out of jail, may have been the killer. The surgical precision involved in the removal of whole organs from the victims led many to speculate that the Ripper must have been medically trained.
But the real conspiracy theory, the one that goes all the way to the top, is the suggestion that Prince Albert Victor ("Eddy" to his family) was the real killer.
In 1970 Dr Thomas Stowell wrote an article for an edition of The Criminologist, which described in detail the life of a potential Ripper suspect and member of the aristocracy whose life seemed to mirror that of Prince Eddy.
Stowell based his piece on notes from Sir William Gull, a Royal physician who had treated Prince Eddy, and who has also been proposed as a possible suspect thanks to his medical training and aristocratic background.
Gull's notes supposedly describe Eddy's visit to the Caribbean, his infection with Syphilis, the creeping insanity caused by the disease and his eventual descent into homicidal mania.
The saga linking Eddy to the killings intensified in 1976 when a book was released entitled Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution, which reignited interest in the Prince and his notoriously dark character.
The book featured evidence from Joseph Gorman, who claimed to be the son of Victorian painter Walter Sickert, and suggested that the slayings were part of an elaborate conspiracy by the Royals and the freemasons to protect Prince Eddy from a love child he fathered with a poor Catholic girl.
Gorman claims Mary Kelly and other ripper victims sheltered the illegitimate youngster, but were bumped off one by one as the Royals, freemasons, and government sought to obscure the Prince's infidelity and hide the Catholic heir to the throne.
Finally, theorists claim that the murders were carried out at the behest of the masons, using masonic rituals, and that the head of the Metropolitan Police, a freemason, covered his cronies' tracks by destroying evidence.

- Dr Stowell's son burnt the private notes of Sir William Gull after his father's death, thus blocking any attempt to get hold of them and find out what the physician really said about Prince Eddy and the killings.

- Prince Eddy was withdrawn and prone to dark moods. If contemporary descriptions of his character flaws are to be believed, he may well have had the temperament to carry out murder.

- Any scandal involving working girls, deprived areas of town and members of the Royal family would certainly have been swept under the rug by the British establishment during the Victorian era, as paranoia over Republican elements in society remained strong.

- Theories linking Gull to the murders on behalf of the Royal family are more persuasive than those linking Eddy to the crimes. Gull was medically trained, intelligent, capable and matches some of the descriptions given of the Ripper.

- Dr Stowell wrote a letter to The Times shortly before his death in which he claimed that he had not intended to suggest that Prince Eddy had been Jack The Ripper.

- No evidence of Prince Eddy being involved with prostitutes has survived, and of course, there is no firm proof linking him to any of the murders.

- Court records from the time show Eddy was often out of the country and certainly out of London at the time of most of the killings. On the night of the double murder of Stride and Eddowes he was in Balmoral, Scotland.

- Historians say the more convincing of the Ripper's letters to the media and police bear the hallmarks of a commoner rather than an aristocrat. However, the nature of the killings and the fact that the murderer escaped massive police efforts to capture him point to a more intelligent and aristocratic individual.

- None of the notes taken by officers investigating the case at the time name Prince Eddy, Sir William Gull or any other member of the upper classes as a suspect in the slayings.

- Joseph Gorman, one of the main players in suggesting the conspiracy theory, is a singularly unreliable source. Even though the author of Jack The Ripper: The Final Solution, came to believe some of his theories, he described Gorman's claims as "rambling" and "vague".

The Jack The Ripper conspiracy theory is a classic. From Royal madmen to secret societies and sickeningly brutal murders, it really has it all. All, that is, apart from believability. The theory is simply not confirmed by historical fact. With Royal court records, police files and contemporary news reports to hand, no serious historical researcher has ever proven a link between the Prince and the killings. The Ripper mystery remains one of the most fascinating, and disturbing unsolved crimes ever. But the solution clearly doesn't lie with the fanciful belief that the heir to the throne somehow concocted a massive conspiracy to hide his penchant for hookers in a bloodbath that terrorised Victorian London, and provided the modern serial killer with a blueprint for mass murder...