Three Of The Most Convincing Jack The Ripper Suspects
By: Grant Piper
Tags: Mystery, History, London, True Crime, Serial Killers

Sketch of Jack the Ripper (National Police Gazette / Public domain)

Three Of The Most Convincing Jack The Ripper Suspects

Attempting to warm the coldest of cold cases

Jack The Ripper is one of the most infamous cold cases of all time. Over the span of a few years in the 1880s, someone killed five women in the Whitechapel district of London. The unidentified murderer has been the subject of intense speculation and fascination ever since.

There have been dozens of potential suspects put forward over the years. The case drew a lot of contemporary attention at the turn of century as well as later revisiting by modern investigators yet no consensus has been reached on the actual man behind the murders.

That being said, here are three of the most compelling suspects likely to be Jack The Ripper.

1. Carl Feigenbaum

Carl Feigenbaum was a German sailor who had a long history of traveling around Europe and the United States. Feigenbaum was convicted of the murder of an elderly widow by the name of Juliana Hoffman and sentenced to death. He was eventually executed via electric chair.

The only murder they could pin on Feigenbaum in court was that of Hoffman but evidence suggests he could have been the primary suspect in many more killings, including the ones in Whitechapel connected to Jack the Ripper.

Feigenbaum’s own lawyer claimed, after the execution, that he had suspicions that Feigenbaum could have been the notorious London serial killer. Feigenbaum had also been credibly linked to another gruesome murder in New Jersey.

Carrie Brown was a prostitute who was viciously killed and mutilated in a manner extremely similar to the victims of Jack The Ripper. While Feigenbaum was never convicted of the murder, it went unsolved and many think he was the likely perpetrator.

Whitechapel, London is near the waterfront and it was likely that Feigenbaum could have stayed there while docked in the city. The similarities of the Carrie Brown killing, combined with his conviction for murder along with his ability to have been in Whitechapel at the time of the murders makes for a strong case against Carl Feigenbaum as a potential Jack The Ripper.

2. Francis Tumblety

Francis Tumblety was an American con artist, huckster and potential serial killer. Like many people at the tail end of the 19th century, Tumblety was cashing in on false medical products under the guise of secret knowledge obtained from American Indians. This was a common practice at the time but Tumblety was exceedingly good at it.

Tumblety traveled all over the United States and Europe selling medicines, elixirs and herbs that he claimed would cure all sorts of diverse ailments. The business earned him a good amount of money and a similar amount of notoriety.

So how does a medical quack become implicated in one of the most notorious murder cases of all time? Jack The Ripper was not the only crime that Tumblety was connected to. He had been detained and interviewed as being an accessory to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

The infamous doctor was also prone to delusions, often writing self aggrandizing pamphlets about himself and spinning wild tales about how he was accepted by royalty and famous authors around the world for his medical expertise.

Instead, he was credibly placed as living in a rundown section of Whitechapel by Donald Rumbelow in his book The Complete Jack the Ripper: Fully Revised and Updated. Tumblety was also a noted misogynist who had a particular loathing for prostitutes. Rumbelow recounts, in his book, that Tumblety had a collection of uteruses in jars which he said he kept for study but assured all who asked that they came from “every class of woman”.

His money, ability to travel, particular hatred for prostitutes and women combined with accounts of him being unhinged and potentially having lived in Whitechapel for a time leads many to believe that Francis Tumblety could have been Jack The Ripper.

3. Aaron Kosminski

Some people claimed at the time that Jack The Ripper was a destitute immigrant living in an impoverished state in the Whitechapel district. Multiple police documents and records had the name Kosminski written in them. Some of these documents featured the name in the margins as notes while others had the name featured as the name of a potential suspect.

The problem? There was no first name associated with Kosminski. They did not know if it was surname, a slur, a code or something else but the name kept coming up.

Upon further investigation they were only able to locate one man who might fit the bill, Aaron Kosminski. He was found in an asylum years later.

Supposedly, Aaron Kosminski had threatened female members of his family with a knife and was put away in the asylum in 1891 for this violent tendency. No other violent incidents could be pinned on Kosminski but he did live in the vicinity of the “Canonical Five” murder sites at the time of the murders.

The asylum records diagnosed Kosminski with paranoid schizophrenia. That combined with his proximity to the prime Jack The Ripper murder victims, and his past incident with brandishing knives against females makes him a prime suspect.

He was even named as Jack The Ripper in a book claiming to have linked Aaron Kosminski to one of the Ripper victims via DNA evidence. The evidence was sensational, if not flimsy, but adds another layer of possible weight to the claim that Kosminski was indeed the infamous serial killer.