The A to Z Encyclopedia of Serial Killers Read Online Free PDF Page A

thousands of missives like this one, addressed to “My darling, sugar-sweet Adolf,” “My beloved Führer,” or sometimes simply “Dear Adi.” The fact that the greatest Mass Murderer of the twentieth century could stimulate such overheated fantasies only confirms the disquieting point: there is something about monsters that just turns certain women on.

Jack the Ripper
    The horrors began in the early morning hours of August 31, 1888. At roughly 3:45 A.M ., while walking down a deserted, dimly lit street in London’s East End, a market porter named George Cross stumbled upon what he took to be a tarpaulin-wrapped bundle. Peering closer, he saw that the sprawling heap was the butchered body of a woman, later identified as a forty-two-year-old prostitute named Mary Anne Nicholls. Her throat had been slashed, her belly slit, her vagina mutilated with stab wounds.
    Though no one could have suspected it at the time, the savaging of Mary Anne Nicholls was a grisly landmark in the history of crime. Not only was it the first in a string of killings that would send shock waves throughout London and, eventually, the world, but it also signified something even more momentous—the dawn of the modern age of serial sex murder.
    A week after the Nicholls atrocity, the mutilated remains of Annie Chapman, a wasted forty-seven-year-old prostitute suffering from malnutrition and consumption, were discovered in the rear of a lodging house a half mile from the site of the first murder. Chapman’s head was barely attached toher body—the killer had severed her neck muscles and nearly succeeded in sawing through her spinal column. She had also been disembowelled.
    The true identity of the killer would never be known. But several weeks later, the Metropolitan Police received a taunting Letter by a writer who claimed to be the culprit and signed his note with a sinister nom de plume. The name caught on with the public. From that point on, the mad butcher of Whitechapel would be known by this grisly nickname—Jack the Ripper.
    Two days after police received the Ripper’s letter, the killer cut the throat of a Swedish prostitute named Elizabeth Stride. Before he could commit any further atrocities on the victim, he was interrupted by the sounds of an approaching wagon. Hurrying away, the Ripper encountered Catherine Eddowes, a forty-three-year-old prostitute who had just been released from a police station, where she had spent several hours sobering up after having been found lying drunk on the pavement. The Ripper lured her into a deserted square, where he slit her throat. Then, in the grip of a demoniacal frenzy, he disfigured her face, split her body from rectum to breastbone, removed her entrails, and carried off her left kidney.
    “The throat had been cut right across with a knife, nearly severing the head from the body. The abdomen had been partially ripped open, and both of the breasts had been cut from the body. . . . The nose had been cut off, the forehead skinned, and the thighs, down to the feet, stripped of the flesh. . . . The entrails and other portions of the frame were missing, but the liver, etc., were found placed between the feet of this poor victim. The flesh from the thighs and legs, together with the breasts and nose, had been placed by the murderer on the table, and one of the hands of the dead woman had been pushed into her stomach.”
    From an 1888 newspaper description of Jack the Ripper’s final victim, Mary Kelly
    The final crime committed by the Ripper was also the most hideous. Onthe evening of November 9, he picked up a twenty-five-year-old Irish prostitute named Mary Kelly, three months pregnant, who took him back to her rooms. Sometime in the middle of the night, he killed her in bed, then spent several leisurely hours butchering her corpse—disembowelling her, slicing off her nose and breasts, carving the flesh from her legs.
    Following this outrage, the Whitechapel horrors came to an abrupt end.