About the Project
The information on this website is made up from around 2,300 tweets totalling roughly 51,100 words. The information was tweeted periodically over a four month period in 2012 - a year in which the days of the week aligned with those of 1888 making an even more tangible connection to the Victorian world.
Where the times of the tweets were not relevant to the narrative they've generally been removed, however it should be noted that many of the times which have been retained are not categorically the time of the event being discussed. Don't ask me how I knew that someone spoke a particular sentence at exactly 2.17am, as it may be an approximation! There are often indications in the narrative as to how a witness identified a time in their statement - i.e. a clock chiming, but on other occasions I have attempted to calculate an approximate journey time in order to set the scene. The challenge was to walk that fine line between embellishment and telling a real-time narrative.
I tried to exclude conjecture and debatable events - George Hutchinson's testimony for example is very contentious, so I included him giving his statement at a later date, but didn't use his version of events to tell the narrative at the time. It's better to have less detail and retain the known facts, rather than allow potentially false information to creep in. I've tried not to editorialise on the controversial issues but rather present events as they were perceived at the time. So Polly Nichols is number two because she was considered the second Ripper victim at the time, irrespective of whether modern revisionism generally makes her the first.
The project did change my view of certain aspects of the case - Martha Tabram being one example. Until I did "Ripper Live" I had shared the common belief that her murder was different to the others and she was a random killing prior to Polly. However, once I'd seen how the date and timeline of her death related to the others, and read details which aren't usually reported, I formed the opposite view. The evidence which supposedly excluded her from the canon was questionable. The reasons to include her were numerous and harder to dispute.
The reverse was true with Liz Stride. I used to have no doubt that she was a Ripper victim but the more I look at the events of that night, the harder it is for me to see her death as anything other than an untimely coincidence. What's often overlooked is that the witness Israel Schwartz gave two different statements - one to the police and one to the newspapers. It is the jumbled police statement which is always used in reconstructions and deductions, despite the more coherent newspaper version basically describing two drunks competing for the attention of the same girl - with fatal consequences. Schwartz himself said he thought he was witnessing a domestic.
The trouble with reaching this conclusion about Liz is that it spoils another tantalizing piece of evidence. There's a particularly compelling letter which purports to be from the killer himself and it speaks of his "double event". If he didn't kill Liz, then the letter is a fake. So you see, nothing is ever simple with this case. There isn't a stack of clear evidence, just a house of cards which easily collapses.
But that's what makes it interesting. The reason we are still fascinated is because there is so much room for debate and there are endless ways in which bits of information can be interpreted. I don't claim to have any answers, but I do feel that things appear different when you are able to read the question more clearly. So here is a version of the story without 126 years of mythology and conjecture attached. No conspiracy theories, no wild conjecture, just the events as best as I can piece them together from witness statements and contemporary news - taking into consideration the poor police work and dubious journalism of the time!
It is a difficult subject to deal with, especially late at night, and revisiting these crime scenes has not been pleasant. However, I hope that you find this site interesting and that it doesn't give you too many nightmares!