The movie background of Murder in the Twist City

Until the early 19th century, London was still a very dangerous city for ordinary residents; in fact, it was not until 1829 that Scotland Yard established a police system with jurisdiction over the entire city. More than half a century later, in 1888, under the increasingly dazzling light of the colonial empire, London had become a benevolent city with considerable guarantees of personal and property safety. However, at the bottom of Victorian society, there were many undercurrents of social and political changes caused by hypocrisy, poverty and injustice; this was especially evident in the East End of London (East End), which was famous for immigrants and poverty. In less than a mile square of land, the East End of London not only gathered a large number of workers at the bottom of traditional British class society, but also absorbed about 40,000 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Russia.

In order to survive, the lucky male residents of the East District sold their labor at nearby wholesale markets and warehouses and docks to earn a meager income, while the unlucky ones were unemployed due to too many competitors for labor and lived on the streets. Women and children in the East District had to sell an average of eleven hours of labor every day to make ends meet or supplement their families from humble occupations such as weaving and chimney sweeping, which were estimated to be about 200. For women, selling their bodies is a relatively high-paying industry. In 1888, it was estimated that there were between 60,000 and 80,000 prostitutes in London, and the East End was one of the areas with the most frequent sex trade in the city, and was among the "lowest" among them.

The Whitechapel Serial Murders

It was a hot summer night on August 7, 1888. A worker suddenly appeared in a dark alley near Whitechapel in East London. A female body was found that had been stabbed thirty-nine times, nine of which had cut through her throat. The deceased was Martha Turner, who was nearly forty years old, an alcoholic who had been a local prostitute for thirteen years.

At 3:45 a.m. on August 31, a coachman who was just about to start his work walked in a desolate warehouse area (Bucks Row, now known as Durward Street, located in White Street) half a mile away. A hundred yards behind the Chapel subway station, 43-year-old prostitute Mary Ann Nichols was found lying in a pool of blood; it was only during the autopsy that afternoon that the unusual nature of the murder was discovered. The deceased's face was severely bruised, his neck was cut twice, some of his front teeth fell off, his lower abdomen and pubic area were stabbed open, and his intestines were pulled out of the abdominal cavity. The forensic doctor determined that it was caused by a thin and sharp blade of six to eight inches.

The East End of London has always been notorious. The area around Whitechapel is known as the East End among the East Ends. However, although crimes are common there, there are very few fatal murders, let alone cases like the Marian case. A shocking case of brutality. After the fact of Marianne's tragic death was made public, the media began to call it "the White chapel murders" together with the Marta murder and another murder that also occurred in the local area earlier that year. It was believed that the murderer was The same person, and reported extensively on the murderer's brutal methods of committing the crime. The media's vivid comments made local residents panic and uneasy. Women in ordinary households no longer dared to walk at night. Police plainclothes detectives were everywhere, and residents formed their own patrol teams. The media have speculated whether the murderer will commit another crime after these emergency measures.

At 5:45 a.m. on September 8, an old coachman who lived on the third floor of a low-cost rental apartment saw a female body lying by the fence in the backyard. He was so frightened that he almost fainted. Police later investigated and found that the 47-year-old deceased Annie Chapman was another prostitute. Her neck was cut and her abdomen was disembowelled. Her intestines were spread across her left chest. There were no signs of struggle during her lifetime. An autopsy revealed that part of the deceased's reproductive and urinary organs were The officer disappeared and it was determined that the murder weapon was similar to the previous one.

At one o'clock in the morning on September 30th, the horse driven by Louis, the coachman, hesitated on a dark road near his house. Louis struck a match and saw a woman lying on the ground. He looked carefully. After taking a closer look, it turned out to be another female corpse. The deceased was Elizabeth Stride, a 44-year-old Swedish prostitute. Her throat was slashed but her laparotomy was not performed. The cause of death was excessive bleeding due to a cut to the left carotid artery. Next to the morgue (40 Berner St.) is a normal Jewish gathering place. There were dozens of Jews gathering in the club at the time of the incident, and no one noticed anything unusual outside the house.

While a large number of police forces were concentrated in the area of ??the murder scene, and there was a lot of discussion about the murderer's method this time, which was different from the previous ones, at 1:45 in the morning, a patrolman opened a bag a few hundred yards away. Another female body was found in Miter Square, Aldgate. The body had been disfigured by a dissection and had her ears cut off, and part of her kidneys were missing. According to the patrolman's description, there was nothing unusual when he passed by the area at 1:30. Without exception, the deceased was another prostitute: 46-year-old Catherine Eddowes.

Jack the Ripper

On September 27, a news agency received a letter written in red ink and stamped with a fingerprint. The non-working class man's joking tone revealed that he was the murderer of the serial murders and signed his name Jack the Ripper; on October 1, the same unit received another postcard that was judged to be the work of the same person. The police did not attach much importance to this clue, thinking it was just one of the many pranks taken at the time (later research was inconclusive on the authenticity of the two letters). However, through media reports, the name "Jack the Ripper" has spread like wildfire; from then on, the whole of London, the whole of the UK and even the world began to call the murderer of the Whitechapel serial murders this way. The extremely bloodthirsty and perverted "Jack" is not satisfied yet at this time.

At 10:45 a.m. on November 9, the landlord asked someone to collect rent from Mary Kelly (Mary Kelly, who lived at No. 9 Millers Court) who had been late in paying rent for six weeks; The trustee went to Mary's residence and knocked on the door, but no one answered. He found that the door was locked, so he looked into the house through the window and saw a scene that was like a hell on earth. Mary was lying naked on the bed in a pool of blood. Her nose, ears and breasts were cut off, and some skin was removed from her face and lower abdomen. She was disemboweled and some of her internal organs were taken out and scattered on the bed and bedside table. The walls were stained with blood. . The police later determined that the murderer had committed the crime for at least two or three hours, making the experience of the deceased the most tragic of the above-mentioned murders. Mary Kelly, 26 years old, of Irish descent, had separated from her former cohabitant just a few days before her death. She was the youngest and most beautiful of the serial murder victims, and the only one with a fixed residence.

After the Mary Kelly case, Jack the Ripper seemed to disappear; the same criminal methods did not appear again in London for several years. Analyzing this series of cases, we can summarize many of the same characteristics as follows:

1-All the victims were cheap prostitutes at the bottom of society, and except for Mary Kelly, none of them had a fixed residence.

2-Most of the victims were married and had children. They later left their families and lived in the East End of London, and they all had cohabitants.

3-All victims had moderate to severe alcohol problems; alcoholism was often the reason these victims left their families.

4-Except for the Mary Kelly case, the victims in the other murder cases were all seen walking on the streets an hour or two before their bodies were found, and they were all drunk. (Catherine Aidall was detained for being drunk and causing trouble on the night of the incident. He was released from the police station at 1 a.m. and was found dead on the street at 1:45 a.m.).

5-Except for the Mary Kelly case, where a neighbor heard a woman calling "murder!" at around three in the morning, the other murders occurred not far from the main thoroughfares. There are many homes nearby, but when the murder happened, it seemed that there was no sound.

6-The police determined that the deceased showed no signs of strong struggle before his death.

7- Within thirty minutes to two hours before each murder, witnesses witnessed the deceased talking to a man in his thirties, strong, dignified in appearance, with a beard and a hat.

The police, which invested a large amount of manpower at the time, felt powerless against a series of murder cases with unknown motives, no traces of the crimes, and the only eyewitness testimonies that were often contradictory. At that time, fingerprints had not yet been used to investigate cases, and forensic science was quite crude. The police, who handled the case conventionally, were not even sure which class should be the focus of the investigation (confirming the class affiliation of the suspect first is the traditional way of handling cases in a class-conscious society). Faced with this unprecedented hot potato, the police's ability to handle the case has been criticized. Even Queen Victoria expressed doubts about the efficiency of the police's handling of the case, which led to changes at the top of the police department. After the media enthusiasm subsided, the police decided in 1892 to cease formal investigation into the Whitechapel serial murders.

Who is Jack the Ripper

After the Whitechapel serial murders, the police made no progress in investigating the case. Local residents living in fear encountered a man with a slightly suspicious appearance and behavior. They called on the crowd to take them to the police station, but most of these so-called suspects were immediately dismissed by the police after interrogation. After several murders occurred, the forensic doctor believed that the murderer should have knowledge of anatomy based on the knife skills and the time of the crime during the autopsy. The huge building of the Royal London Hospital was a hundred yards away from Marianne's corpse, so he immediately Some people rumored that the murderer might be a nearby doctor; several local doctors were even followed and detained by plainclothes police for a long time. For this reason, until recent films, Jack the Ripper has been portrayed as a mysterious man in black, carrying surgical instruments in one hand, walking into darkness on the foggy East End streets.

At that time, there was also a chauvinistic idea that the cruel and perverted Jack the Ripper must not be a native of England, so the suspects pointed at immigrants. Due to the anti-Semitic sentiments of East End residents at the time, the Jewish immigrants who were most commonly suspected of being involved in the crime were the Jewish immigrants who lived in the East End at that time. In addition, it was once rumored that a Russian anarchist immigrated to Paris in the 1870s and immediately became insane. He murdered several prostitutes and was imprisoned in a mental hospital. However, before the serial murders in 1888, he was deemed to have been cured by the hospital. He was released and moved to the East End of London, but there was no trace after the murder.

After World War I, special books on Jack the Ripper began to appear in the UK (the first was The Mystery of Jack the Ripper published by Leonard Matters in 1929). Since then, the craze of researching and trying to find out who Jack the Ripper is has continued, and the terms ripperology and ripperologist have even appeared, and a large number of related books have been published so far. These studies have identified dozens of suspected Jacks, but the vast majority of the claims are simply conjecture with very little evidence. Among them, the royal conspiracy theory that has become the reasoning habit of some modern British people involves the Duke of Clarence, the grandson of Queen Victoria. Models in the social painting world got married and had children, and the serial murders were committed by members of the secret Franciscan society led by a certain nobleman to cover up the fact). Many people still believe that Buckingham Palace and Jack the Ripper are more or less related.

Jack may have been the midwife

Conan Doyle, who began composing the Sherlock Holmes series shortly before the murder, claimed that based on his Sherlockian reasoning, the murderer was a woman who disguised herself as a woman to avoid the murder. A man with eyes and ears. This "female connection" later developed into another theory, which believed that Jack the Ripper may have been a midwife, and there was a theory that Jack the Ripper was changed to a female Jill the Ripper.

The release of a secret police report in 1959 that had been sealed for 65 years also caused ripples. In this 1894 report, the police sergeant in charge of the case stated with certainty the three most likely suspects, namely a 31-year-old lawyer who committed suicide by throwing himself into the Thames at the end of 1888; A Polish Jew who was sent to a mental hospital in March 1889 and died soon after, and a slightly mentally disturbed Eastern European immigrant habitual thief. According to subsequent research, it is not impossible that these three people are Jack the Ripper, but the possibility is not very high.

Recently, two more detailed works have proposed two different theories. In 1995, an American pointed out in his book on Jack the Ripper that the key to identifying the murderer lies in the last case of a series of murders, because this murder case, which is the complete version of the disembowelment, has some characteristics that are different from the previous cases. . After digging into the details, the author concluded that the Ripper was actually Joseph Barnett, the cohabitant of Mary Kelly, the last victim. Joseph was originally a fishmonger with a relatively good income. In July 1888, his fishmonger's license was revoked due to theft, and he relied on odd jobs to make a living. Mary, who had not been seen on the street for a long time, had to return home due to the sudden decrease in income from her cohabitant. He went to the streets to resume his old business and planned to break up with Joseph.

According to the inference of the book, Joseph first warned Mary by killing prostitutes serially, and then in anger, he used the most brutal method to kill his girlfriend who had been living with him for a year and a half.

The authenticity of the mysterious diary

The other book, which was published in 1998 and is more than 400 pages long, is related to the one that was "discovered" in Liverpool in the early 1990s. "The Diary of Jack the Ripper". In April 1993, a local newspaper in Liverpool revealed that someone had discovered an old-fashioned black leather-bound diary with a gold edge. The diary's author claimed to be the enigmatic Jack the Ripper. Affected by the previous forgery of Hitler's diary, most "Ripperologists" at that time scorned the diary and immediately thought it was another forged stunt. However, the film's producer, Paul Feldman, spent five years going through all the relevant files and used the diary, which had the first 48 pages cut off with a knife, leaving only 63 pages of scrawled handwriting, as ink and paper. The date was determined and the conclusion was that neither he nor other experts could deny the authenticity of the diary. What is particularly convincing is that some of the statements in the diary were facts that the police deliberately concealed after the incident in order to facilitate the investigation of the case. These hidden parts were not made public until more than ten years ago, and the diary itself was determined by the prison But it was written in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author of the diary is a Liverpool businessman named James Maybrick.

Mystery

After one hundred and ten years, has the answer finally been revealed? Some "Ripper scholars" said that some of the questions they raised still cannot be satisfactorily answered. The answer to the mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity seems to have been found in Liverpool. However, like many answers over the past 110 years, this answer still cannot be recognized as the correct answer. Jack the Ripper, a mystery novel that has been co-written by many people for more than a hundred years, seems to continue to be written after all: to solve a classic mystery in the history of world crime, to find a mystery that may never be solved. A definite answer.