Unsolvable Mystery

Going down the rabbit hole at the 2008 Jack the Ripper Conference

It’s an early fall Friday night in Knoxville, and most citizens are at high school football games, enjoying some TGIF television, getting started on their weekend drunk or maybe kicking back on a porch enjoying the unseasonably warm weather. But in a room on the mezzanine level of the Four Points by Sheraton hotel on White Avenue, a group of about 25 people have just finished dinner and are browsing through books bearing such titles as Victims of Jack the Ripper, Complete Jack the Ripper, Ultimate Jack the Ripper and Ripperology. Though many are locals, some have come from as far as New York and Los Angeles, Edinburgh and London, to attend the 2008 Jack the Ripper Conference, an annual gathering devoted to parsing the ins and outs of the Western world’s most notorious set of unsolved murders.

As the attendees amiably chat and greet familiar faces they haven’t seen since last year, a hotel guest unaffiliated with the conference — perhaps here for the Blue Cross/Blue Shield conference or wedding party also staying at the hotel — pops her head in the door.

“OK, we’re curious,” she says. “What’s Jack the Ripper?”

There’s a slight pause that might possibly stem from a disbelief that anyone could never have heard of the man (or men, but probably not a woman) responsible for the death and mutilation of at least five prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London’s East End, 120 years ago this autumn. Conference co-organizer Dan Norder explains this to the curious passerby, who replies, “I know who he is, but why are y’all having a conference about it?”

A fair question, one that inevitably came up when I mentioned the story I would be covering the weekend of Oct. 10-12. As co-organizer Kelly Robinson’s own teenage daughter said when she saw yet another Ripper-based magazine arrive in the mail, “What can you even say about it anymore?”

Had the curious outsider attended the series of lectures or eavesdropped on the endless conversations in the book room or hotel bar, she would have learned far more than she could have ever cared to know about not just the Whitechapel fiend for whom the conference is named, but the fascinating history of the men and women who have studied this case for the past 120 years.

“You’d be surprised at how many regular people show up,” explains Robinson of the enduring interest in this case. “People say how unusual the interest is, but everybody’s into this to some degree. It’s not as unusual as people think. CSI is the biggest show on television and those Murder Mysteries are the most popular Dateline shows. Phillip [Hutchinson, who spoke at the conference] is a Ripper tour guide in London, and he says people take the tour because they think it’s something unusual, but everybody takes the tour, so it really isn’t.” (Fun Fact 1: Hutchinson is also apparently a Sigur Ros-head, and follows the band around Iceland several times a year.)

The extent to which Jack the Ripper has captured the public imagination, not just in Great Britain, but abroad, is evidenced by the items up for auction and raffle at the conference: Ripper-themed T-shirts, cigarette cases, lockets, comic books and a PC video game. There’s even a DVD copy of Time After Time, the 1979 movie starring Malcolm McDowell as H.G. Wells, who pursues Jack the Ripper into the late-20th century via a time machine. These items to varying degrees all portray the Ripper as a sinister man in an overcoat and top hat lurking in the shadows, but this image which has long been the Ripper’s avatar is most likely far from reality, say Norder and Robinson.

“It’s basically taken on the status of a myth or a legend,” says Norder. “There’s some Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde in there, and other Victorian-era fictions. A lot of myths actually make it into some of the Ripper encyclopedias.”

The reason there are so many myths and legends surrounding the murders, and the reason people gather each year at a conference to discuss the latest discoveries and developments in the case, is that nobody’s really sure of anything about the case, even the number of victims.  There are “the canonical five,” which most everyone seems to agree were murdered by the same person, but new victims seem to be offered up for consideration with some frequency, along with new suspects.