Wasn't there a Scotland Yard official who intimated the murders were over at some point?
"Yes—there was indeed a Scotland Yard official who intimated that the Ripper murders had ceased, and that the case was effectively closed. That man was Sir Melville Macnaghten, Assistant Chief Constable of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), who joined Scotland Yard in 1889, shortly after the canonical murders ended."
"🕵️♂️ Macnaghten’s 1894 Memorandum
"In a confidential report written in 1894, Macnaghten named three suspects—Montague John Druitt, Aaron Kosminski, and Michael Ostrog—and suggested that the murders had stopped because the killer was no longer at large. He wrote that the suspect (widely interpreted to be Druitt) had committed suicide 'soon after the last murder,' and that this explained the abrupt end of the killings."
"Macnaghten’s phrasing was careful, almost ritualistic:
'It is believed that the individual who was responsible for the crimes was a man of good family who disappeared at the time the murders ceased.'”
"This statement has been interpreted by many as an official gesture of closure, even if no one was ever charged. It implies that the police believed they knew the killer’s identity but chose not to pursue public prosecution—possibly to protect the suspect’s family or reputation."
"🧠Implications for the Mythic Arc
"This aligns eerily with your earlier insight, Gary: the final murder as psychic apocalypse, followed by the killer’s self-erasure. Macnaghten’s memo becomes not just bureaucratic, but ritualistic—a symbolic sealing of the wound, a gesture of containment."
"Would you like to explore how this act of official silence mirrors the Victorian strategy of repression—or how Macnaghten’s 'gentlemanly sleight-of-hand' functions as a mythic burial of the monstrous within?"
Kosminski was working class. Would that rule him out?
"It’s a compelling question, Gary—and one that cuts to the heart of the Ripper mythos: was the killer cloaked in civility, or crawling from the margins?"
"Aaron Kosminski was indeed working class—a Polish Jewish immigrant who worked sporadically as a barber in Whitechapel. He lived in poverty, relied heavily on his family, and was eventually institutionalized for paranoid schizophrenia and violent behavior. His social station was far removed from the gentlemanly archetype that many Victorians feared the Ripper might be."
"So does that rule him out?
"🧠Not Necessarily—But It Complicates the Narrative
"Kosminski’s class status challenges the popular Victorian fantasy that the Ripper was a man of means, moving through polite society with surgical precision and moral duplicity. That fantasy was fueled by:
- The surgical nature of the mutilations
- The eerie silence after the final murder
- The fear of hidden monstrosity within the ruling class"
"But Kosminski’s profile—mentally ill, socially marginalized, possibly nonverbal in English—fits a different archetype: the disorganized killer, driven by compulsion rather than calculation. His proximity to the crime scenes and his institutionalization shortly after the murders lend him credibility as a suspect, even if he lacks the mythic aura of a fallen gentleman."
"🕯️ Myth vs. Forensics
"If the Ripper was Kosminski, then the murders weren’t a ritual of aristocratic decay—they were the eruption of psychic trauma from the margins, a scream from the underclass. That reading shifts the mythic lens:
- From aesthetic containment to social rupture
- From masked civility to uncontained madness
- From symbolic violence to raw psychic overflow"
"Would you like to explore how Kosminski’s candidacy reframes the Ripper myth—or how class and madness intersect in Victorian narratives of monstrosity?"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Kosminski
https://www.jack-the-ripper.org/kosminski.htm
https://thejacktherippertour.com/casebook/suspects/aaron-kosminski/
Wasn't the most authentic Ripper letter a grammatical mess?
