The Ripper Revealed?

[MusicManiac]

The Ripper Revealed?

 

 

Jack the Ripper's Stomping Grounds

Shop windows and real estate signs line a row in the Whitechapel area of east London, once the haunt of Jack the Ripper.

 

 

 

Nov. 11, 2005— Some of the greatest murder mysteries of all time, including the identity of Jack the Ripper, could be solved soon thanks to a major breakthrough in DNA technology, Australian researchers say.

 

Developed by Ian Findlay at Queensland's Griffith University, the method is able to extract and compile a DNA fingerprint from as little as one human cell up to 160 years old.

The technology, called Cell Track-ID, consists of modifications to the traditional DNA extraction technique — known as short tandem repeats (STR) profiling — which works by amplifying the DNA billions of times to look for very specific markers.

 

But while the STR method needs samples of 200 or more cells, Cell Track-ID provides single-cell forensic DNA fingerprinting.

Cell Track is very similar to the STR profiling, but the technique has been refined to have a much better extraction protocol. This keeps the DNA intact, therefore providing much more information and making it possible to examine the smallest genetic material that is up to 160 years old, Findlay told Discovery News.

 

The method has been tested on strands of hair found in a 150-year-old brooch. Cell Track revealed the hair came from four different people — three females and a male.

 

According to Findlay, the technology will open tremendous possibilities in forensic science, allowing the re-opening of old, unsolved murder cases.

 

"Potentially, it could also solve the mystery over the identity of Jack the Ripper," Findlay said.

The elusive Ripper carried out horrific murders between August and November 1888. At least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel area in London were found horribly disfigured, often with organs missing.

________________________________________________________

 

The Ripper-

The name Jack the Ripper was coined in taunting letters sent to the press and police, in which the writer claimed credit for the crimes.

 

Ripper's career ended as suddenly as it had begun with the murderer still at large, making his case one of the history's greatest murder mysteries.

Findlay will first test the new technology on a lock of hair believed to be from Catherine Eddowes, one of Jack the Ripper's victims. Comparison with her descendants will tell if the hair is genuine.

 

The researcher will then use Cell Track to check saliva that could have been left behind by the notorious serial killer, if he licked the stamps on envelopes he sent to the London police.

 

"If we found DNA on the stamps we could compare that with DNA from the descendants of the suspects," Findlay said.

However, chances of success are slim, according to Ripper expert Stephen Ryder, editor of the "Casebook: Jack the Ripper" Web site, the world's largest public repository of Ripper-related information.

 

"It would be difficult to see how DNA testing of any type could ever uncover the identity of a man who left no trace of himself to history," Ryder told Discovery News.

 

Although many hundreds of so-called Ripper letters survive, the general consensus is that they are all hoaxes.

 

"While there is a chance that DNA testing might help identify one or more letter writers, that's about as far as you can take it," Ryder said.

Crime novelist Patricia Cornwell has already attempted to find a genetic match between a suspect and stamps from the so-called Ripper letters. In her 2002 book, "Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper — Case Closed," Cornwell identified Jack the Ripper in the impressionist painter Walter Sickert.

 

Cornwell's forensic scientists found a sequence of mitochondrial DNA — DNA passed down on the mother's side — on a "Ripper letter" which matched sequences found on Sickert's personal correspondence.

[MetalHeart]

Oh shit. This will be cool if it works...

 

I used to be mildly obsessed with Jack, haha. It's an interesting piece of history.

[Lycaon]

I dunno, part of the story of Jack the Ripper is the mystery.

[MetalHeart]

Are those fighting words?

[Lycaon]

Do you dare challenge me?

[MetalHeart]

Perhaps I do. Perhaps not.

What's it to you?

*pulls glove out of pocket slowly*

[Lycaon]

*Summons his ninja-squirrels, and pulls on some brass knuckles*

[MetalHeart]

Now you've gone too far.

 

 

 

 

 

ps I'm Jack the Ripper. The mystery is solved.

[The NZA]

This does sound interestin....anyone ever read Alan Moore's From Hell? Awesome look at Jack.

[Lycaon]

Unfortunately, I haven't. And to further the shame, I have seen the From Hell movie.

[MetalHeart]

From Hell is most delicious... mmmm.

Alan Moore is lovely.

[MusicManiac]

Jack the Ripper Contest in UK

 

Post the pefect murder plot and win...

 

What will they think of next... Like the feds aren't proof reading this shit... heh.

 

I might have to borrow this shit from Signal...

 

 

well SiBob pretty much gave a good answer...

 

except! our man in super tight blue spandex wasn't using gloves.

 

f i n g e r p r i n t s

 

Our CSI: NASA unit, would have cracked it in the matter of: 1st launch window, open a dust kit, package the latent prints, and scanned the FBI archives.

 

Only... unless we have a cryptonite handcuffs... it would be sort of hard to bring him in.

Honestly though? A perfect murder? hmm, do you know the one you are killing? or is it a random act?

 

If you know the subject to be murdered.

 

Dont tell anyone that you have seen that person recently.

 

Dont molest the crime scene.

 

Wear shoes that are 2 or 3 sizes too big so the shoe prints arent accurate, and wear 4 or 5 layers of thick socks to compensate.

 

Go to a barbershop, and collect their trash. (explained later)

 

wear newskin or scotch tape over your finger tips... or both.

 

Your murder weapon of choice... a home made icesicle... thick enough to not melt until you can leave your place of planning, make it to the target, and stab your target, in one place, one time. Don't want to stab your target more than once, because the friction of the stabbings would begin to melt the ice and leave water inside the body. One quick, hard jab to the base of the neck (air pipe region or the main blood stream region) and a rapid pull out would prevent any great deal of blood to remain on the ice.

 

Secure your icesicle in a sock, let it melt. Wash your sock(s) with bleach detergent to kill off the very little blood DNA that does exist and wear them the next day and let your body sweat salts saturate the sock to further wear out any possible DNA left behind.

 

Back to the barber's trash... throw all that wonderful hair all over the fuckin' place so its impossible to trace 'recent' hairs that might have been yours if there was a struggle between you and the subject.

 

Go home.

 

Take off the tape on your finger tips, ball them up, and take a lighter and melt it. And your newskin, rub your dry hands til it comes off then lotion them up nice and clean.

 

your murder weapon doesn't exist. no traces left behind.

 

oh and yes.. I kinda put the order of it in wrong... secure the ice in sock.

 

go home

 

wash your socks then...

 

do your tape newskin thing ect...

 

 

[MusicManiac]

 

 

Jack the Ripper tour travels back in crime

By ellen raine-scott

 

Publish Date: 6-Jul-2006

 

With fellow Ripperologists in the Victorian serial killer’s old stomping grounds, Ellen Raine-Scott guards her theories of just whodunnit. Dominic Wild photo.

 

The night is bitterly cold and rainy in old London town—exactly the kind of gruesome weather you’d expect when you’re hunting a killer. I’m standing at the Tower Hill tube station, directly across from the Tower of London, trying hopelessly to keep my hands warm.

 

I’ve found myself in London quite suddenly, having just been commissioned by CBC Radio to cover the boat race on the Thames between Oxford and Cambridge. As luck would have it, I’ve just finished reading Patricia Cornwell’s Portrait of a Killer: Jack the Ripper Case Closed (Penguin Canada, 2003). I don’t like mysteries: I can’t stand not knowing the end of a story. But I’ve become obsessed with finding the true identity of Jack the Ripper.

 

In her New York Times bestseller, Cornwell makes the startling assertion that she has DNA evidence to prove the identity, once and for all, of Jack the Ripper. The Ripper is, she claims, none other than Walter Sickert, the famous London artist who studied under James Whistler and lived in Whitechapel, where the crimes were committed in 1888. Has Cornwell finally cracked history’s most notoriously unsolvable case?

 

A former history major, I’m reluctant to trust the theories of a crime novelist. But in London, I’m presented with the perfect opportunity to put some of Cornwell’s claims to the test. So I’m standing here, shivering, with a dark and singular purpose. I’m awaiting the arrival of Donald Rumbelow, London’s infamous Ripper expert, to walk me back to the shadowy East End of London in the fall of 1888. The Autumn of Terror. A world of gaslight and torches and murder. I wish he’d hurry up.

 

When Rumbelow finally arrives, he emerges from an inky side street wearing a black fedora and dragging a large, heavy suitcase, looking surprisingly similar to the police-witness drawings of various Ripper suspects. For a moment I wonder whether it could contain a body. I can’t help it. It’s just that kind of night.

 

Rumbelow is the author of The Complete Jack the Ripper (W.H. Allen, 1987 revised edition), what many consider to be the authoritative guide to Ripperology. (Yes, that is a word.) He’s also the former curator of the City of London Police Crime Museum, and—and this is by far my favourite credential—he once took Johnny Depp on a guided tour of the Ripper’s hunting grounds when the actor was preparing for his role in the Ripper film From Hell.

 

Rumbelow looks disapprovingly at my camera and notepad, asking that I refrain from filming any video images of him. He is, apparently, worried about amateur Ripperologists stealing his show. Ripper walks are big business in this town.

 

Our walk back in time begins on August 31, 1888, when Mary Ann “Polly” Nichols’s body was found at Buck’s Row, near a warehouse and a row of slum houses. Her throat had been slashed, she’d been stabbed multiple times, and she was left lying with her skirt up around her waist in a pool of blood. Rumbelow explains that the victim’s friend accused one of the soldiers housed in the Tower of London, which is why his tour begins here.

 

How easy it is to be transported back in history. You walk the same cobblestoned streets that the victims walked, and many of the original buildings are still standing, like the gothic-looking St. Botolph’s Church. This church was known as the Church of Prostitutes because women walked in slow circles around it to attract clients. It is probable that this site is where the Ripper picked up at least one of his victims.

 

As we pass through dank, sinister alleys between warehouses en route to the crime scenes, I can see why the Ripper signed his postcards to police “From Hell”. At the turn of the century in industrial England, these former slums would have been polluted, disease-ridden, and desperate places. Poverty forced many “unfortunates”, as they were called during the Victorian era, to turn to alcohol and prostitution. Even today, the tenement houses are missing glass panes.

 

When we stop at Middlesex Street, once the boundary between the City proper and the East End, it still feels like crossing an invisible line into the city’s heart of darkness. This is still the stomping ground of the unfortunate. A quarrelsome fellow points at Rumbelow and slurs, “Don’t listen to him! It’s all bollocks! Bollocks!”

 

Finally, we step onto Goulston Street. Rumbelow points to a row of brick Victorian buildings, formerly the location of the doorway where the Ripper left a bloody scrap of clothing and scrawled the controversial message: “The Juwes are not the men that will be blamed for nothing.” The structure now houses a Chinese Restaurant, ironically named Happy Days. In her book, Cornwell asserts that the misspelling of Juwes was deliberate, and one (allegedly) used by the Freemasons. The fact that Walter Sickert had Masonic connections further points to his guilt, in Cornwell’s opinion.

 

Other Ripperologists have suggested that Sickert was a friend of Prince Eddy, Queen Victoria’s grandson, and helped the Prince find a nanny for his illegitimate child. That nanny was Mary Kelly, who is generally cited as the last Ripper victim. As the conspiracy theory has it, Mary Kelly fell on hard times and told her friends (a group of prostitutes) that she had witnessed a secret marriage between Prince Eddy and the baby’s mother—a commoner introduced to Eddy by Sickert. Kelly and her friends concocted a plan to blackmail the royal family. The women were then murdered under the guise of Jack the Ripper to protect the royals.

 

The tour is about to end, and it’s my last chance to ask Rumbelow what he thinks about Cornwell’s charge that Walter Sickert was Jack the Ripper. He gives a one-word response: “Nonsense.” I immediately assail him with Cornwell’s arguments. “But the DNA evidence… Jack wrote his notes to police on artist paper… Sickert’s drawings match the drawings in the Ripper’s letters…”

 

“Utter nonsense,” Rumbelow insists. I plead with him. “Then, who was Jack the Ripper?” “Read my book,” he says, popping open his suitcase and pulling out a copy. As frenzied Ripper groupies move in for autographed copies, I wander away, disgruntled, to the Ten Bells pub. This is the pub that Mary Kelly and the other victims frequented. Inside I’m warmer, but I’m still not happy with my ending.

 

The next day, I can’t resist dropping by the Tate Modern, where one of Sickert’s paintings is exhibited. The painting, Brighton Pierrots, depicts a vaudevillian act on-stage before a scattered audience, with many empty seats. Who are the missing audience members? I feel the painter mocking me. Was Sickert perhaps comparing tragedy and comedy, and speaking to a performance that remains unseen? Suddenly, a cold shiver runs through me. I have the ending I’ve been looking for.

 

 

ACCESS: Donald Rumbelow’s Ripper tours begin at 7:30 p.m. at the Tower Hill tube station. He guides approximately three times per week in high season, and the tour costs £6. See www.walks.com/. The Ten Bells, commonly known as the Jack the Ripper Pub, is in Spitalfields on the corner of Commercial and Fournier streets.