London's Shadows: The Dark Side of the Victorian City by Drew D. Gray

liason, was Broder a male prostitute? Broder asked Hebden for money, and became aggressive when Hebden refused, threatening `he would smash me and my place up,.93 Eventually Hebden was forced to hand over a variety of items and write a note authorizing Broder to pawn a carriage clock - he was clearly very frightened that Broder was out of control and extremely violent as he had been that morning. The manager at the printing workshop where William Brodie's brothers were employed described Brodie as a 'reckless character addicted to drink' and it is not impossible that Broder and Brodie were one and the same person.94 According to his landlady and her daughter, Brodie was generally quiet and well behaved but `when in drink he is very curious in his manners and says some quaint things'.95 Brodie claimed to have been to South Africa to work in the diamond mines and when this claim was examined it proved he had sailed on 6 September 1888 and so could not have been responsible for the murders in that year. He was also found to have confessed to a murder in Kimberly and so it would seem that he was a rather disturbed individual who was simply wasting police time. Once he had been discharged for murder they arrested him for fraud.96
    The trail had gone cold again but the police increased the numbers of detectives and plainclothes officers in the area in case Alice McKenzie's murder really did mean the killer was operating again. Was McKenzie the Ripper's sixth (or seventh) victim? We cannot rule out the possibility that, as with Liz Stride, the killer was interrupted in his work and that is why her mutilations were less severe. However, it could also be the work of a copycat killer or even someone who knew McKenzie and wanted her dead and saw a way in which to make it look like the work of the Ripper. Like so much of this case the more one uncovers the less clear the overall picture becomes.
    On Friday, 13 February 1891, PC Ernest Thompson found Frances Coles lying in a roadway under a railway arch. Her throat had been cut and before a doctor could arrive she expired. A man named Sadler was eventually prosecuted for her murder and some believed they had `Jack' at last, but the case against Sadler collapsed when he was able to establish an alibi. Frances' killer, like the other women before her, was never caught. This is where the case files into the Whitechapel murders are closed.
    CONCLUSION
    So what have we learnt about Whitechapel murders based upon the evidence (such as it is) surviving from the police archives and the pages of the press? The killer remains masked and will probably never be revealed to everyone's satisfaction. Modern criminology would support a theory that the murderer was, if operating alone, either a non-social or disorganized asocial killer: both have elements that fit the persona of `Jack'. We also need to consider David Canter's geographical profiling as all of the victims shared a very similar locale. This may be purely coincidental of course, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that a `slummer' or other person was travelling into the district because he knew he would find a suitable target for his rage and lust. But it would be more plausible to believe that someone who evaded the law and left so few clues and was seen by so few people knew the area he operated in and had somewhere close by to escape to. This would make `Jack' a local man and also someone who could blend into his surroundings with some ease; a nondescript individual of little or no importance. That he assumed centre stage with his devastating purge of Whitechapel's `unfortunates' must have caused him a frisson of excitement: perhaps that is one of the reasons he killed.
    The murders were beyond anything Victorian society had experienced before, both in their intensity and in the way that they unfolded in the press, week by week. The press and the public became involved in this case in an unprecedented manner, which merely served