I just saw a recent (2023) documentary TV series called Becoming Evil: Serial Killers Among Us; Unsolved Cases. Episode 1 largely dealt with one of the earliest and most famous cases, the 1888 butchery of five prostitutes (some contend there were others) in the Whitechapel section of London. The murderer was never caught and his identity—he was presumably a man, and suspicious males had been sighted—is hotly contested to this day. Yet we all know him as Jack the Ripper.
Illustrations relating to the Whitechapel or “Jack the Ripper” murders. The Illustrated Police News, London, Nov. 24, 1888. Courtesy of the British Library.
The first couple of episodes of Becoming Evil: Serial Killers Among Us; Unsolved Cases were worthwhile to me because they explored other early serial murder cases as well—and not just in England but in the United States. (Yes, Virginia, there are documented cases of psychopathic serial killers in America going back at least until the mid-19th century.) But what made me sit up and notice was the fact that the Jack the Ripper segment featured commentary by a British historian and true-crime writer named M. J. Trow, who has theorized on the identity of Jack, and also the fact that the filmmakers kept showing an image of a 30-something dark-haired man with a mustache and wearing a cap—implying that this was an image of the person whom Trow has figured for the killer.
Now, I interviewed M. J. Trow by email in 2009 after seeing him on another show about Jack the Ripper. He had just published a book called Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009), in which he suggested that Jack may have been a morgue attendant and workhouse resident named Robert Mann. If the photo that Becoming Evil was implying was the Ripper was actually Robert Mann, that seemed to me to be BIG NEWS: an actual photograph of a suspect who wasn’t a wacky guess, like Queen Victoria’s grandson, Prince Albert Victor, Duke of Clarence and Avondale, or the American known mass murderer Francis Tumblety, a more likely but still a much-debated candidate for the crimes. (Incidentally, M. J. Trow’s suggestion that Robert Mann was the Ripper has also been pooh-poohed by many “Ripperologists”—Jack the Ripper buffs, for lack of a better word, an opinionated bunch whose interest is nevertheless serious rather than prurient and whose knowledge of the murders is encyclopedic.)
So I contacted Trow about it. Surprisingly, he didn’t even know about the release of Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer—let alone got paid for the interview—and informed me that the photo of Robert Mann was “totally spurious, just a generic picture of some guy in the street.” Damn!
Well, my recent exchange with Trow inspired me to rerun our original 2009 interview, which is still a favorite of mine.
Here goes . . .
The Ripper reexamined: Historian M. J. Trow reveals a new, viable suspect
By David Chesanow (December 2009)
Serial murderers, including serial murderers with sexual motivation, have terrorized humanity since time immemorial; we just don’t know to what extent. The vampire and werewolf legends of lore no doubt account for many of these, and I think it’s interesting that a recent medical theory attributes some historical cases of vampirism to rabies infection: It seems that humans who contract the virus have been known not merely to bite a lot but to have supercharged, insatiable sex drives. Think what you like, it had to have been a lousy way to go, for everyone involved.
But I don’t mean to be flip. In this age of advanced communications, we are used to knowing—or being able to access—the news any time we want it and, with simulcasts, even as it happens. The same goes for crime forensics: Who knew even 25 years ago that DNA analysis would be so widely and routinely used to identify perpetrators and discount innocent suspects? Yet, 1,200 or even 120 years ago, what reasonable explanation or law enforcement measures could be offered when, one by one, people suddenly went missing or turned up mutilated somewhere in China or Peru or France or Russia?
Or Victorian England . . . That’s where the most notorious, the most enduring series of murders (in terms of the public consciousness) took place within a few short months in 1888, in an area of London called Whitechapel, by a butcher whom fearful Britons would nickname and the world would come to know as Jack the Ripper. At least, in the teeming capital of the British Empire, news traveled fast, and any supernatural theories—if there were any offered—fell before modern psychology. And while I would point out that Bram Stoker knew his audience when he published Dracula nine years later (in 1897), in the waning years of the 19th century, modern, enlightened Londoners knew Jack was no vampire but a very human and very dangerous nutcase. The fact that the murderer was never caught or his identity conclusively confirmed ensured that “Ripperology” would be a rich subject for writers and filmmakers to mine for the next century; I’m certain it will remain so for at least one more.
I won’t recount the “canonical” five horrific murders of prostitutes attributed to this particular deviant: All the gruesome details, including a number of hideous police photos, can readily be found online, along with some theories linking subsequent murders to the Ripper and others, ranging from the cockeyed to the credible, suggesting any number of contemporary and new suspects as the killer. There have also been a couple of pretty fascinating programs about the case on the Discovery Channel, one of which submits that Jack booked passage to the United States and resumed his killing spree in New York City. Another, Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed, which I find even more compelling, is based on the book Jack the Ripper: Quest for a Killer (Barnsley, U.K.: Wharncliffe Publishing, 2009) by British historian and former high school teacher M. J. (“Mei”) Trow, who has written a slew of mystery novels as well as historical studies of Spartacus, the 11th-century Spanish nobleman Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar (“El Cid”) and Vlad III (a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler, the 15th-century Wallachian prince on whom the character Dracula was based).
In a nutshell, Trow has gone through the published records of the Ripper murders and identified an overlooked individual, Robert Mann, as a very likely possibility for Jack. A workhouse inmate employed as a mortuary attendant, Mann was called to testify at the first two inquests (in the slayings of Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman) but was disoriented and incoherent—which not only discounted him as a credible witness but also failed to raise a red flag, so to speak, that Mann might have had something to do with the crimes. What’s more, using the modern investigative procedure of geographic profiling pioneered by Canadian police investigator Kim Rossmo—whose amazing mathematical system can show on a map where a serial killer likely lives and/or works, based on the locations of the crime scenes, with a success rate as high as 85 percent—Trow demonstrates that (1) both Mann’s living quarters and the mortuary where he worked fell well within the high-probability area for the Ripper’s home turf, and (2) based on where the victims were discovered, Mann would have been well aware that at least two of the bodies would be brought to the very same mortuary where he was employed, giving him more opportunity to gloat over his handiwork. (In his 1999 book Geographical Profiling, Rossmo has written that 22 percent of serial killers return to their victims’ dump sites.)
“There has been so much research into this case especially over the last 50 years that I doubt whether anything has yet to surface. Having said that, to give you one example, the autopsy notes on Mary Kelly compiled by Dr. Thomas Bond had gone missing and were posted anonymously to Scotland Yard in 1987.”—M. J. Trow
Why do I blog on a Jack the Ripper investigation? Because I believe that collecting—of objects or information—should be an intellectual adventure, a quest to discover something new and interesting or even momentous. We are always hearing of “cold” cases that are not just revisited but solved, and the perpetrators brought to justice decades after committing their crimes; of recent archaeological discoveries that force us to revise conventional views of people and events in the distant past; of newly found books and letters and photographs long buried in library stacks and archives that add something surprising to subjects we thought we knew all about. I think M. J. Trow’s research, based as it is on new methodology, can broaden any collector’s or armchair historian’s or even criminal investigator’s vistas.
Here’s my recent interview with the author:
Q: Is there still a lot of interest in Jack the Ripper among Britons and Londoners in particular?
M. J. Trow: The Ripper crimes form the basis of an ongoing industry, especially in London itself, where there are nightly tours of the murder sites and other related areas. Although Ripperology now has an international dimension—Jack is famous throughout the world—it is inevitable that the real focus of interest should be in the place where the crimes were carried out. Bookshops throughout Britain that contain true, crime sections invariably have books on Jack, and the Whitechapel Society (www.WhitechapelSociety.com) with its regular periodical sends out to a wide fan base.
Q: Is this still considered an open case by the police? Are there officers assigned to the case to assist researchers, or do some do it purely out of personal interest?
MJT: There is a general belief that no unsolved case is ever closed, but that is simply not true. The Ripper case was officially closed in 1892, although documentation relating to it has survived to the present day. There is therefore no dedicated team of serving police officers working on the case, although several retired policemen have gone into print with various suspects.
Q: The online edition of the Daily Mail (Oct. 2009) indicates you have been actively focusing on Robert Mann as a suspect for the past two years. When and how did you have an “Aha!” moment when Mann appeared to you as a viable perpetrator of the crime? Did anyone at all suspect him at the time?
MJT: The “Aha!” moment probably came when I realized that Mann had been abandoned in the workhouse as a child by his mother, who would have been in her forties at the time. This corresponds not only to the ages of all his victims (except Mary Kelly) but is also consonant with behavioral psychologists’ ideas of serial killer motive. The fact that Robert Mann was dismissed as being liable to fits and therefore unreliable as a witness at the inquest into Annie Chapman means that he was never seriously considered as a suspect. Four of his seven victims were brought to his mortuary, and the idea of a disturbed mortuary attendant first surfaced in the profiling carried in 1988 by John Douglas of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico.
Q: In Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed on the Discovery Channel, it was pointed out that Mann was called to testify in the Mary Ann Nichols and Annie Chapman inquests. Yet, was he not merely a workhouse inmate assisting in a mortuary and, one would assume, assisting a doctor performing autopsies? Why would he have been called as a witness? Would his responsibilities in a mortuary gone beyond moving corpses around and cleaning up? Could he have gotten actual training in opening up bodies?
MJT: I think it unlikely that Mann would have received any formal training but he would have been on hand to observe autopsies at close hand. We know from other sources that he was trusted to go out of the workhouse to collect corpses, so he is not merely “moving bodies around” in the confines of his own mortuary. Anyone connected with the deceased, from relatives and friends to any eyewitnesses, the police and auxiliary staff (e.g., Mann), would be called to an inquest as a matter of routine.
Q: At the time of the murders, Whitechapel was an impoverished area where many immigrants lived, and in fact there were some immigrants on the list of suspects. Mann was supposedly born in Mile End New Town around 1835, yet Mann is a German name, and he was called Mansel in one account. Is it possible that he was in fact an immigrant? Would that be relevant to the investigation?
MJT: I do not believe that Mann was an immigrant but the fact that his father was a weaver may imply that the family were among the religiously persecuted Huguenots who emigrated to England for safety in the 17th century. Although largely French, some of these Huguenots would have lived along the Rhineland border with Germany. The name Mansel and Marne, which is also ascribed to him, are simply careless work by British journalists.
Q: Your belief in the authenticity of the “From Hell” Ripper letter (sent to Scotland Yard with part of a victim’s kidney) was pretty compelling: The handwriting, spelling and other characteristics seemed uncontrived. Are there no confirmed writing samples belonging to Robert Mann that might be compared to the letter to prove Mann had written it? (Mann would have been about 54 at the time of the murders.)
MJT: Nothing has come to light yet. My belief is that he probably received a rudimentary education at what in England were called National Schools (for ages five to 10) and thereafter as a child in the workhouse might have received continuing educational basics after that. It is unlikely he would be required to write anything, even in the context of his job as mortuary attendant. Since he never married, we do not even have a signature on marriage records.
Q: Is there any Ripper material that, in your opinion, has not been adequately examined and that may conceivably yield more leads?
MJT: There has been so much research into this case especially over the last 50 years that I doubt whether anything has yet to surface. Having said that, to give you one example, the autopsy notes on Mary Kelly compiled by Dr. Thomas Bond had gone missing and were posted anonymously to Scotland Yard in 1987. A number of items from the original police investigation have gone missing and have not been returned. It was not the custom of any British police force to keep artifacts from cases after they were closed. The exhibits in Scotland Yard’s Black Museum are there almost by accident.
Q: Are there other avenues that you are pursuing that may help confirm or discount Robert Mann as a suspect?
MJT: It would be great to learn more about Mann’s childhood and how other people (e.g., workhouse inmates) regarded him. Unfortunately, people of this class were usually illiterate and so left nothing in the way of letters, diaries, etc.
Q: You have said that we will probably never know conclusively who Jack the Ripper really was. Have you ever brainstormed with other Ripper investigators, either privately or in a panel discussion, on your respective preferred suspects? Are Ripper investigators very competitive about their findings, or do you ever collaborate?
MJT: I would love to take part in a television debate of this kind. However, I suspect we would all end up shouting at each other and achieving no consensus!
Q: Certainly, modern forensic technology (like plotting on a map the likely area where a killer lives or works, based on the murder locations) has helped your investigation. Are there other aspects of the “Internet Age” that have been of special value to you in your research?
MJT: Many records, such as census information and workhouse details, are now available online. Although all these exist in various libraries and institutions around the country, to be able to work on them at the press of a button is obviously a huge advantage. I must mention the excellent Casebook: Jack the Ripper site (www.Casebook.org), which contains a mass of material collated by Ripperologists and forms a basis for ongoing research.
Q: Do you ever receive viable ideas or leads from amateur investigators? Are there many collectors of Ripper lore, and what do their collections comprise? Have you encountered many people with a strictly sordid fixation on the case?
MJT: There is a body of Ripper-related material—the first full book on the murders was written in 1908—and there are people who collect anything to do with the case. I myself have 20-plus books written from a number of different angles. Undoubtedly, there are people obsessed with the murders purely because of their grisly nature. The same people probably collect details from the lives of Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Henry Lee Lucas, etc.
Q: There have been some very graphic crime photos of Ripper victims in books and even on TV: The Mary Kelly murder scene is a case in point. Yet, “Jack the Ripper: Killer Revealed” showed only the faces of some of the dead victims. Was this intended to de-sensationalize the subject and focus more on the investigatory aspects of the story?
MJT: Yes, this decision was taken by the program’s director because we wanted to focus on the new suspect and the mechanics of finding him. Having said that, I think the dramatic reconstructions were very vivid and caught something of the horror of the original.
Q: Many people nowadays—adults as well as younger people—express no interest in history; many have negative memories of history class from their schooldays. Are you still a high school history teacher, and does your writing inspire your students to pursue historical subjects?
MJT: I gave up teaching last year to pursue writing, TV appearances, etc., and I like to think that a lot of students remember my lessons with interest and affection. It is all too common an experience that a fascinating subject is killed stone dead by a boring teacher; I hope I was never one of those. Yesterday, I received a phone call from a student of mine of over 30 years ago asking me to contribute to a forthcoming TV history program. This has nothing to do with Jack, but he told me that the first lesson he had with me, which was an introduction to the problems of historical research, was about the Ripper.