Although there have existed serial killers throughout human history, none before "Jack the Ripper" has created the same amount of panic bringing about a new modern era of professed and sadistic serial killers.
In fact, many of the typical criteria of a serial killer are embodied in the unidentified and infamous murderer who called himself "Jack the Ripper".
Jack the Ripper's First Brutal Murders in London's East End
Within the span of a few months in 1888 the Whitechapel district in London's East Side was immersed in a sense of growing panic and utter horror.
Five prostitutes were found dead, but the most gruesome aspect was its savagery, something that also added to its fame even in as distant a place as New York where it equally made the headlines.
Mary Ann Nichols, the first victim, was found horribly mutilated with her abdomen ripped open and her intestines pulled out. The butchery presupposed a "skilled" killer who had managed to cut his victims open in such a precise way and within a short span of four or five minutes.
As this way of killing had become Jack the Ripper's trademark, it was not difficult to conjecture that Annie Chapman had fallen victim to the same hand. Her throat had been cut deeply and her intestines dumped on her shoulder. Police were considering either slaughter-men, medical students or even physicians as possible murder suspects.
Jack the Ripper's "Game" with the Police
Yet the police were not left in the dark for too long. They received a letter from the killer in which he for the first time identified himself as "Jack the Ripper" and in it he confessed that he "loved his work" and would continue "butchering people until he was caught".
It was another trait to be found among later serial killers, such as the Zodiac or Son of Sam, for example, killers who enjoyed engaging in a cat and mouse game with the police.
After the letter more bodies were found, including the corpse of Catherine Eddowes, who had been completely disemboweled and was missing her uterus and her left kidney. Half of the latter organ was sent out to the chairman of a vigilance committee in a parcel with a note claiming that the killer himself had eaten the other half.
The public had been in a state of shock and despair since the police had failed to bring in any results and the self-appointed committee did not manage to make any strides either.
However, after the fifth killing, which was one of the most gruesome with the victim's face being cut beyond recognition and her breasts and internal organs surgically removed and carefully arranged around the corpse, the killings suddenly stopped.
Who was Jack the Ripper?
The enigma around who Jack the Ripper actually was could never be solved although there have – and still are – many purported suspects, ranging from Queen Victoria's grandson to Lewis Carroll, the author of "Alice in Wonderland", and even Leopold II, the king of Belgium, yet none of them had sufficient evidence against them.
In 2002, the American crime fiction writer Patricia Cornwell in her book "Portrait of a Killer" claimed that the British painter Walter Sickert (1860-1942) was the killer, based on handwriting and some matching DNA samples of the letters.
Nonetheless, this hypothesis did not stand as experts claimed that the letters found were most likely "hoax communications" and had not been necessarily written by the killer.
Jack the Ripper may not have killed as many people as other serial killers, but he was one of the first prototypes who matched on many points the definition scale of a serial killer and he was able to create panic and grab the attention of the media and the public and has, as a result, become engraved in crime history.
Source: Brian Innes - Serial Killers: The Stories of History's Most Evil Murderer