Since 2009, the British have brought the drama "Whitechapel Blood Case", a suspenseful crime theme, well-made and widely acclaimed. And the first thing this drama pulled out was the big hot spot of "Jack the Ripper".
Whitechapel Blood
The Whitechapel Massacre actually refers to the serial murder case that broke out in the East End of London in 1888, the murderer called himself "Jack the Ripper", and killed a number of prostitutes with extremely cruel means, which made the entire London people panic at that time. If we look at the city of London at that time, we will find that the huge city covered with thick fog was full of hatred.
7 August 1888, Whitechapel, East London, England. At midnight, a worker named John Rivers was drunk as usual and staggering home. Suddenly, he tripped up and fixed his eyes on a lady lying on the ground.
By the faint light, John found that the woman was dead. He quickly called the police and called the police. The police officers who arrived at the scene saw the scene that shocked them: the poor lady was lying on her back in a pool of blood, her throat was cut, and there were 39 knife wounds on her body!
The investigation found that the deceased' name was Martha Turner, a 28-year-old prostitute.
In fact, the crime rate was high throughout the city of London at that time. In 19th-century London, there were slums everywhere, breeding grounds for crime. White Chapel, Baker, Tyborne Execution Ground, and spittford became known as "crime havens." The Whitechapel Massacre took place in the Spitafford area.
It's full of immigrants and impoverished workers, thieves and gangsters on every street corner, and of course, cheap prostitutes fill every intersection under dim street lights.
At that time, the London police were understaffed, and in these slums, order could only be symbolically maintained, and the fight against crime was seriously insufficient.
To be sure, the murder of prostitutes like Martha Turner was nothing new in London at that time. They have no place to live, their social status is extremely low, and they do not even have family and friends. Policemen who can't find clues don't want to spend any effort to continue the investigation, and usually simply close the case.
Unexpectedly, in the early morning of August 31, another prostitute was killed. This time it was still near Whitechapel, where the deceased was marianne Nicholas, a 43-year-old prostitute. This time, not only was her throat slit, but she also had horrific knife wounds on her face and was brutally dissected — a brutal method, so different from ordinary murders, that she attracted the attention of the media.
On September 8, another prostitute was murdered, and the scene is still unbearable.
In this small area, there were several murders against prostitutes, and the methods were so cruel that they immediately caused a sensation throughout London. Some media outlets report several cases directly together, calling them "Whitechapel serial murders."
The whitechapel area was panicked, and the police had to increase their manpower and increase patrols every day.
As a result, on 12 September 1888, a London news agency, the Central Press Office, received a letter in red ink describing the killing of several prostitutes, and the sender called himself "Jack the Ripper" and threatened the police that if he was not caught, he would continue to commit the crime.
The code left by the Zodiac Killer
If you like crime stories, you must know that there is a famous "zodiac killer" in the United States. In the late 1960s, the mysterious killer caused a series of homicides and repeatedly sent letters to the media and the police claiming to be able to find him by deciphering his code. However, until now, the password and his identity have not been confirmed.
In the 1984 Japan "Strange Man Twenty-One Face Incident", the mysterious prisoners also constantly sent letters to the media to predict their criminal acts.
Why should criminals take the initiative to contact the media and take the initiative to attract the attention of the police?
In addition to being well prepared and confident of avoiding the police, the bigger reason may be that they just want to create a hot spot in public opinion, let the public care about him, care about the case - we have reason to guess that Jack the Ripper's cruel methods are to attract the attention of the media. The act of sending letters is to express their hatred for "prostitutes" and to attract everyone's attention.
Nineteenth-century London
A dozen days after the media received the letter, at 1:00 a.m. on September 29, a 44-year-old Swedish prostitute was brutally killed. In less than an hour, Catherine Edoz, a 46-year-old prostitute, was found in Bishop's Square, and the scene was equally bloody and cruel – it was hard to believe that the two locations were not far apart, and that even at night there were many pedestrians passing by, and the police patrolled every 15 minutes.
Bold and murderous, and the murderer Faliso can cause great harm to the victim in a short period of time. Many people believe that the murderer is most likely a professional surgeon.
On October 16, Jack the Ripper sent another letter in which he boasted about himself, ridiculed the police, and unabashedly expressed his hatred for prostitutes.
On the morning of November 10, Mary Jane Kelly, a rather attractive prostitute in Whitechapel, returned home with a man for the night the first night. But in the morning, when the landlord sent someone to ask for rent, he found Mary's body.
The scene was so cruel that even the police and forensic doctors who first arrived were frightened... The prisoners were so arrogant that the whole of England was shocked. The Queen of England personally interrogated and asked the police to quickly handle the case and catch the murderer. Charles Warren, the head of the Metropolitan Police, was under pressure and resigned.
Unexpectedly, it was from this time that Jack the Ripper never committed another crime. Subsequently, the London police announced that they would stop investigating the whitechapel serial murders, and who was the real murderer became a permanent mystery.
For more than a hundred years, speculation about Jack the Ripper's true identity did not stop. Police and civilian researchers have listed about 200 suspects, and dna experts in previous years claimed to have found the real culprit... However, because the police no longer continue to investigate, it is impossible to determine who Jack the Ripper is.
Although there are also researchers who use the knowledge of criminal psychology to try to decipher Jack the Ripper's motive for killing. However, we cannot ignore that those who are victims are the lowest people in society.
Slum people
At that time, people in the slums were discriminated against by the upper classes for a long time. They attributed London's soaring crime rate to the problems of the poor at the bottom – and prostitutes became the greatest evil in the eyes of some "traditional apologists".
Before the Industrial Revolution, european women typically worked in two ways: as a maid from a rich family, or by doing simple crafts in their own home.
Society at the time did not recognize women working outside the home, and there was a deep-seated tradition that women's tasks were to take care of the family, raise children, and serve their husbands. Unless the family is extremely poor, they can work outside the home.
But the industrial revolution had left countless families without land, and they had to come to the cities, squeeze into the slums, and work desperately for a meal. Some women who really can't support themselves have to sell their bodies.
However, this caused dissatisfaction among some upper classes, who could not stand the large number of prostitutes wandering the streets in the middle of the night, believing from the bottom of their hearts that they were evil and the source of evil. So, there are a lot of crimes against these women.
Jack the Ripper's professional approach shows that he is very likely to have experienced surgical learning - the person who can have such skills must not be a low-level person.
Female and child labour
Britain at the end of the 19th century was very depressed, people often lived in thick fog, and a large number of poor people died of respiratory diseases. And they also understand that this is the smoke coming out of the factory, and they work hard every day, only to exchange for barely enough food and endure disease.
Adult men work at least 10 hours a day, women work equally hard, and even then children under the age of ten have to work outside the home to earn their daily bread money.
According to the book "The Life and Labor of the People of London", 30.7% of the people in London at that time lived below the poverty line.
People who were forced to lose their land could only survive in the cities, and they hated the upper classes. There are a lot of crimes that are directly directed against those who are rich.
On July 17, 1862, for example, Hugh Pilkington, a member of the British Parliament, was attacked on the road by thieves, strangled to death, and robbed of his money — an act that better illustrates the hatred of the upper class of criminals than the daily theft of the rich.
Child labor in coal mines
In 1841 the Royal Commission was commissioned to investigate the employment of workers in the coal mining industry, and the report showed that women and children not only worked "cruelly" hours in coal mines, but also had no safety measures, substandard sanitary conditions and extremely low incomes.
The working class and the poor in the slums hate the bourgeoisie more and more, the gap between the rich and the poor is huge, and the social contradictions are seriously intensified.
It is precisely because of this mutual hatred that the crime rate in London at the end of the 19th century soared, and the criminal methods were cruel. The appearance of Jack the Ripper is a concrete manifestation of this contradiction.
At that time, London was the capital of fog, a paradise for the bourgeoisie, and a "city of hatred".