Walking in Jack the Ripper’s Blood-Soaked Footprints
The City of London, aka the Square Mile—as designated on street signs and addresses by the EC1 postal code—is among the world’s preeminent economic epicenters, where immense wealth flows in and out from around the globe. But remove a single letter from that address, to just E1, which is literally across the street, and you find yourself instead in the East End among the poorest of the poor. Here money hasn’t trickled downstream, sideways, or anywhere near it. The line between wealth and poverty is so clearly delineated that you can stand with one foot in wealth and the other in poverty at the same time.
Whitechapel within London’s East End is the notoriously grim district known for a series of murders that took place between Aug. 31 and Nov. 9, 1888, a small window ever after called the “Autumn of Terror.” Jack the Ripper, as the epochal killer came to be known, murdered and mutilated the bodies of five prostitutes by asphyxiating them, slitting their throats, and disfiguring their corpses in such grotesque fashion that this sequence of murders continues to intrigue generations of Ripperologists.
It is here, on an unseasonably chilly evening near Spitalfields Market within the Whitechapel district, that a disparate bunch of tourists and I find Johnny, a lifelong Ripperologist and, as we will shortly discover, our impressively enthusiastic guide for “The Jack the Ripper Tour, brought to you by Ripper-Vision ™.”