On August 31, 1888, a delivery driver discovered Mary Ann Nichols in London’s East End with her throat slit and abdomen ripped open. Eight days later, Annie Chapman met the same gruesome fate, followed by two more women on the same night in late September.
The press printed daily updates, and the story circulated around the world, including in the United States. When reporters couldn’t find anything new to print, they made it up; one may have even penned the letter that gave the killer his name, “Jack the Ripper,” just to have something to write about.
They didn’t need to wait long for another story. On November 8, Jack the Ripper struck again, mutilating Mary Jane Kelly to such an extent that she could only be identified by her eyes and ears. Then, he disappeared forever.
No one knows what happened to Jack the Ripper. Some speculate that he was arrested for another crime or sent to an asylum. Others believe he committed suicide. Still others point to a royal conspiracy that involved the second in line to the English throne, an out-of-wedlock pregnancy, and five prostitutes who knew too much.
But some theories have Jack the Ripper escaping to the U.S. and continuing his bloody work here. Although there is no definitive proof this ever happened, these cities claim to have a tie to the infamous killer.
New York City
About two years after Jack the Ripper’s last London murder, someone mutilated a Shakespeare-quoting prostitute in Ripper-like fashion in New York City. Newspapers immediately linked Carrie Brown’s death to the infamous killer.
Police arrested Algerian Ameer Ben Ali, nicknamed “Frenchy,” who served 11 years but was later exonerated. To this day, no one knows who committed the crime, fueling speculation that it might have been Jack the Ripper.
Andrea Janes, owner of Boroughs of the Dead, covers Brown’s murder on the Gotham by Gaslight tour she leads. She says that while it’s “thrilling to imagine Jack on American soil,” there’s no concrete evidence to support that he ever was, let alone that he murdered Brown.
However, supposing he did make it to New York, Ripperologists who study Jack the Ripper debate his identity and how long he stayed there. In a Discovery Channel documentary, retired NYPD cold-case detective Ed Norris suspects James Kelly, an escaped asylum patient, killed Brown before traveling throughout the country murdering elsewhere.
London by Foot tour guide Sinead O’Leary believes an American quack doctor, Francis Tumblety, may be the culprit since his trip to London and return to New York align with the murders in both cities. He was also known to show guests his collection of uteruses, an organ Jack the Ripper removed from some victims.
Austin, Texas
Austin, Texas has one of the strongest U.S. connections to Jack the Ripper, although his alleged visits there preceded his London killing spree. Nearly four years before those murders, someone killed six women, a child, and one of the victim’s boyfriends using primarily knives and axes. The Austin killer became known as the Servant Girl Annihilator, and like Jack the Ripper, sexually mutilated some of his victims; he also was never caught.
Jim Miles, owner of Walking Tours Austin, says police zeroed in on a Malaysian cook named Maurice, but he skipped town after telling his boss he was going to London. When Jack the Ripper began killing in 1888, London authorities actually searched for Maurice there but never found him, according to Miles.
While it is possible that the Servant Girl Annihilator became Jack the Ripper, Miles points out there’s no proof it happened. In fact, he doesn’t even bring up the possibility until the end of his Murder Walk Austin tour because he wants to focus on the victims and the city instead.
“It’s not just a gruesome dive into true crime for the sake of it,” he says of the tour. “We’re ambassadors of the city. What’s most fun is painting a picture of what the city would have been like in the late 1800s. It was a violent but exciting time.”
Chicago
An infamous serial killer in his own right, H.H. Holmes started murdering people around the time of the World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago World’s Fair) in 1893. Following the death of his business partner, he was arrested and confessed to killing 27 people, although he initially said he murdered more than 100. His great-great-grandson, Jeff Mudgett, believes Holmes is responsible for at least five more murders in London.
Mudgett claims in his book, Bloodstains, that Holmes is unaccounted for during the Ripper killings and that he wrote two journal entries saying he’d murdered and mutilated prostitutes in London. Additionally, Mudgett believes Holmes’s handwriting matches a letter supposedly written by Jack the Ripper.
Adam Selzer, who owns tour company Mysterious Chicago, says he isn’t sure how the idea started that Holmes was Jack the Ripper, but it’s not true. The two murderers have completely different styles: Holmes poisoned people who knew too much about his fraudulent business dealings while Jack the Ripper was a bloodthirsty killer. Plus, Holmes had an alibi.
“It’s pretty clear from the evidence that he was in Chicago in October 1888 and then New Hampshire with family in November,” Selzer explains.
Even though they were two separate people, Holmes gained recent notoriety with the release of Erik Larson’s bestseller, The Devil in the White City. More than 20 years after the release of the book, Selzer still gives Devil in the White City tours in Chicago.
Norfolk, Virginia
The sea-faring city of Norfolk figures into Jack the Ripper lore as the one-time home of suspect James Maybrick. After forming a cotton merchant company, Maybrick left England in 1874 and moved to Norfolk, where he lived on York Street for six years before returning to England. On the voyage home, he met Florence Chandler, and they married the following year.
When Maybrick’s business faltered, it strained their marriage. He doubled down on his drug use and had multiple affairs, including one with a London woman who lived near Jack the Ripper’s hunting grounds; Florence retaliated with an affair of her own. Then, on May 11, 1889, Maybrick died from an apparent drug overdose. At the time, he was never linked to Jack the Ripper.
But in 1992, Michael Barrett announced a friend had given him James Maybrick’s diary, and in it, Maybrick allegedly confessed to being Jack the Ripper. Most Ripperologists believe the diary is a hoax — the ink is modern, and the murder details appear to have come from newspaper accounts, not the actual crime scenes. At one point, Barrett signed an affidavit that the diary was a forgery, but later retracted his statement.
The following year, a pocket watch purportedly belonging to Maybrick surfaced, inscribed with Jack the Ripper’s victims’ initials and the words, “I am Jack,” but experts debate the watch’s authenticity.
San Francisco
In 1895, Sunday school teacher Theodore Durrant allegedly murdered two young female parishioners of Emmanuel Baptist Church. Little evidence connected Durrant to the murders, and he professed his innocence even on the scaffold where he was hanged. Author and investigative reporter Robert Graysmith agrees he was innocent.
In his book, The Bell Tower: The Case of Jack the Ripper Finally Solved…in San Francisco, Graysmith asserts that not only was the real murderer the church’s preacher, John “Jack” Gibson, but also that Gibson was Jack the Ripper. He contends the preacher fled Scotland not long after the last Ripper murder and also bore a strong resemblance to police sketches of the killer.
Most Ripperologists dismiss the idea. Even if Gibson killed the girls, there’s nothing to connect him to Jack the Ripper. But that doesn’t mean Jack the Ripper couldn’t have traveled to San Francisco and killed there; it’s just not very likely.
Dr. Scott Bonn, a criminologist and author of Why We Love Serial Killers: The Curious Appeal of the World’s Most Savage Murderers, says Americans in the 1890s would have heard about Jack the Ripper, and whenever there was a series of horrific, unsolved murders in their community, they would have naturally made the link between those and the ones in London.
“It’s not an unprecedented thing,” says Bonn, who speaks about serial killers on tour. “People are still trying link cold cases to Ted Bundy and Dennis Rader [the BTK killer].”
Other Cities
Ripperologists have floated other U.S. cities where Jack the Ripper might have visited. Denver is one. Over a 10-week time period in 1894, someone strangled three prostitutes in the city’s red-light district. Locals dubbed the murderer “Jack the Strangler,” and like Jack the Ripper, he was never caught.
New Orleans is also mentioned. Someone murdered several prostitutes, slitting some of their throats, in the early 1890s. Although headlines blamed Jack the Ripper, police believed a local was responsible. By the time the Axeman terrorized New Orleans from 1910 to 1918, citizens didn’t suspect Jack the Ripper as much as they compared the two killers.
Depending on who you ask, Jack the Ripper might be responsible for unsolved murders in Boston, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Or none in the U.S. at all. Just don’t be surprised the next time you’re on a true crime, murder, or ghost tour in an American city and the guide tells the story of how Jack the Ripper once walked the very streets you’re now on.
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