Hallie Rubenhold’s “The Five” reexamines the stories of Jack the Ripper’s victims

British historian Hallie Rubenhold has published a book on the anatomy of Jack the Ripper's crimes, 'The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper'. The work is of interest not only from the standpoint of criminology, but also as an anthropological study of how crime is perceived, and of how the framework of events is shaped by the investigating authorities according to public opinion and stereotype.

The book is built around the stories of five victims of the Ripper: Mary Ann "Polly" Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine "Kate" Eddowes and Mary Jane Kelly, killed in the autumn of 1888. These women are usually called the "canonical five", which implies that the serial killer had other victims whose names and circumstances of death remain unknown to the investigation, and whose connection with Jack has not been proved.

Rubenhold draws attention to the seemingly familiar biographical details of the murdered women: they were single women of about forty, who had endured divorce, domestic violence, poverty, humiliating labour and alcoholism. Three of them were homeless and could not afford even a doss-house.

The investigation described all five as prostitutes, taking Jack to have been their client. The author asks: why? The everyday logic of the time supplies the answer: if she is not a prostitute, what is a lone working-class woman doing out on the street at night? Yet two of the five were indeed involved in the sex trade. At the same time, not one of the case materials points to the possibility of sexual contact between the Ripper and his victims. That is, it has not been proved at all that he killed them on sexual grounds, had relations with them or raped them.

What, then, strikes the author of this unconventional study? In her view, the women share one thing: all of them were killed in a recumbent position. Judging by the descriptions of the crime scenes and the bodies, Hallie Rubenhold concludes that Jack the Ripper killed sleeping women: there are no signs of struggle or resistance, and no one heard screams or noise during the murders.

An interesting observation is that four of the victims were found in places where the homeless usually slept, and that on the very next night a homeless man bedded down at the spot where Annie Chapman was murdered. Indeed, four of the murdered women were on the street because of extreme poverty, and they were helpless above all because they were asleep. They probably never met their killer and were not acquainted with him; he found them because they lay alone under the open sky, in one and the same district of London.

Rubenhold echoes the view of her colleague Rebecca Frost, who has also written on the psychology of the Ripper's murders: the supposition that the women were prostitutes was dictated by public opinion and, in large measure, by the demand of society. Whether they were sex workers or not does not alter the tragedy of these killings, but society found it pleasanter to believe that they were prostitutes, and stereotyped notions of such women made the nature of the crime itself easier to bear.

What is more, during these sensational murders letters reached the newspapers asking: why should we condemn this killer or try to stop him, if he is merely cleansing our streets?

The sorry upshot of the book is that embroidering the victims' stories altered attitudes to the crime as a whole and only furthered the marginalisation of the murdered women, while the details of their biographies were used to build up the mythology of Jack the Ripper as a cunning and even crafty (and therefore clever, and perhaps even interesting) criminal who resorted to elaborate schemes, rather than one who committed appalling crimes without any purpose or awareness.