What is "jack the ripper"

n. An unidentified 19th century murderer in England, who has become part of folklore.

Jack the Ripper is the best known name given to an unidentified serial killer generally believed to have been active in the largely impoverished areas in and around the Whitechapel district of London in 1888. The name "Jack the Ripper" originated in a letter written by someone claiming to be the murderer that was disseminated in the media. The letter is widely believed to have been a hoax, and may have been written by journalists in an attempt to heighten interest in the story and increase their newspapers' circulation. The killer was called "the Whitechapel Murderer" as well as "Leather Apron" within the crime case files, as well as in contemporary journalistic accounts.

Attacks ascribed to Jack the Ripper typically involved female prostitutes who lived and worked in the slums of the East End of London whose throats were cut prior to abdominal mutilations. The removal of internal organs from at least three of the victims led to proposals that their killer had some anatomical or surgical knowledge. Rumours that the murders were connected intensified in September and October 1888, and letters were received by media outlets and Scotland Yard from a writer or writers purporting to be the murderer. The "From Hell" letter received by George Lusk of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee included half of a preserved human kidney, purportedly taken from one of the victims. The public came increasingly to believe in a single serial killer known as "Jack the Ripper", mainly because of the extraordinarily brutal character of the murders, and because of media treatment of the events.

Extensive newspaper coverage bestowed widespread and enduring international notoriety on the Ripper, and his legend solidified. A police investigation into a series of eleven brutal killings in Whitechapel up to 1891 was unable to connect all the killings conclusively to the murders of 1888. Five victims— Mary Ann Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly—are known as the "canonical five" and their murders between 31 August and 9 November 1888 are often considered the most likely to be linked. The murders were never solved, and the legends surrounding them became a combination of genuine historical research, folklore, and pseudohistory. The term "ripperology" was coined to describe the study and analysis of the Ripper cases. There are now over one hundred theories about the Ripper's identity, and the murders have inspired many works of fiction.

Jack the Ripper is a six-part BBC television drama made in 1973, in which the case of the Jack the Ripper murders is reopened and analysed by Detective Chief Superintendents Barlow and Watt ( Stratford Johns and Frank Windsor, respectively). These characters were hugely popular with UK TV viewers at the time from their appearances on the long-running police series Z-Cars and its sequels Softly, Softly and Barlow at Large. The programme was presented partly as a discussion between the two principals in the present day, interspersed with dramatised-documentary scenes set in the 19th century. The series discusses suspects and conspiracies, but concludes there is insufficient evidence to determine who was Jack the Ripper. The experiment was seen to be a success, and the formula was repeated in 1976 with Second Verdict, in which Barlow and Watt cast their gaze over miscarriages of justice and unsolved mysteries from the past.

"Jack the Ripper" is a song written by Clarence Stacy, his brother Charles Stacy, Walter Haggin and Joe Simmons, and first recorded by Clarence Stacy in 1961. His recording, arranged by Lor Crane, was issued that year as a single on the Carol record label in New York City.

The most famous recording was by English musician Screaming Lord Sutch, released as a 7" single in the UK and Germany in 1963 on Decca. It was credited to "Stacey, Hagen, Symonds", produced by Joe Meek and recorded in his Holloway Road studio in Islington, England. The song was banned by the BBC upon its release.

Jack the Ripper is a 1976 German thriller film directed by Jesús Franco and starring Klaus Kinski. In this Swiss-German film Klaus Kinski portrays Jack the Ripper.

Jack the Ripper is an adventure video game, based upon the unidentified serial killer Jack the Ripper. The game was released for Microsoft Windows in 2003. It was developed by Galilea Games and published by The Adventure Company.

The game is set in New York in 1901, where James Palmer, a reporter of the newspaper New York Today, is investigating a set of murders similar to those of " Jack the Ripper" in Whitechapel 13 years earlier; the murders turn out to be the work of the actual Ripper.

Jack the Ripper is a pseudonym given to an unknown man active in the killings in largely impoverished districts in and around Whitechapel, London, in late 1888.

Jack the Ripper may also refer to:

Jack the Ripper is a text adventure game released by CRL in for the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and ZX Spectrum home computers. The game is based on the notorious " Jack the Ripper" murders of the 1880s.

Jack the Ripper was a French alternative rock band active between 1995 and 2008. The name is inspired by the song of the same name of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.

Jack the Ripper was a 1959 film produced and directed by Monty Berman and Robert S. Baker, and is loosely based on Leonard Matters' theory that Jack the Ripper was an avenging doctor. The black-and-white film starred Lee Patterson and Eddie Byrne and co-starred Betty McDowall, John Le Mesurier, and Ewen Solon.

The film borrowed icons from previously successful horror films, such as Dracula (1958) and The Curse of Frankenstein (1957), by giving the Ripper a costume of a top hat and cape. The plot is a standard "whodunit" with the usual false leads and a denouement in which the least likely character, in this case "Sir David Rogers" played by Ewen Solon, is revealed as the culprit. As in Matters' book, The Mystery of Jack the Ripper, Solon's character murders prostitutes to avenge the death of his son. However, Matters used the ploy of the son dying from venereal disease, while the film has him committing suicide on learning his lover is a prostitute.

Jack the Ripper is a 1988 English television film drama about the notorious Jack the Ripper murder spree in Victorian London.

The film was produced to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the Whitechapel murders, and was originally screened on British television in two 90-minute episodes, broadcast on consecutive evenings, in October 1988, to coincide with the exact dates of some of the original events, advertising itself in advance as a solution to the century old mystery of the murderer's identity using newly discovered original evidence. The broadcasts were a cause celebre in English television production in the late 1980s, and gained high audience viewing figures, and were critically acclaimed.