The nine lives of Jack the Ripper

ONE HUNDRED and twenty-three years ago yesterday, a London prostitute named Emma Smith died of wounds suffered several days earlier. Those who follow true crime know that she was initially thought to be the first victim of the notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper.

But this dubious distinction was short-lived.

Smith's death did not fit the pattern that would become associated with the Ripper's technique: strangulation, followed by evisceration with a sharp knife. Despite being a prostitute who frequented the same area of London where the Ripper practiced his appalling butchery, Smith was raped and beaten, not strangled; she reported more than one attacker; and she was sexually assaulted, not with a knife, but with a blunt instrument.

Yet the initial placement of Smith as a Ripper victim is not all that surprising. She was a victim in Whitechapel, in the impoverished East End, where human life was cheap and murder not an unexpected event. Indeed, a second murder on Aug. 7 of Martha Tabram, also a prostitute, and killed in a manner closer to what came to be viewed as the Ripper style, remained for some time in the Ripper "canon," despite the fact that a bayonet was used, not a knife, and no strangulation was involved.

You could say that the Jack the Ripper case existed before it had even gotten started. Once Smith and Tabram had been killed, the police, the press and the public became attuned to the idea of a madman in their midst and alert to discovering a method to his madness.

Fascination with the violent death of prostitutes began to mount. After five subsequent horrific murders over the next three months - of Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly - all displaying marked similarities, Smith and Tabram were dropped by most official investigators from the list of Ripper victims.

And yet their initial inclusion in the case reflects a basic human need to find a pattern in a group of events and to link that pattern to a singular responsible agent.

As students of philosophy and literature, we have long been interested in what the Jack the Ripper case demonstrates about how we cope with the mysteries of life - how we try to arrange events, particularly violent ones, into coherent narratives, wrap them in a cloak of conspiracy, and turn them into myths.

During the Ripper's killing spree, much of London was thick with beliefs about subversive foreign intrigue, claims of police and political coverup, allegations of a secret Jewish plot and rumors of involvement by the Crown itself.

We've seen many other examples of such mythmaking in recent years. The assassination of JFK, the death of Princess Diana, even the attacks of 9/11 have instigated them. These cases have attracted ardent apostles of one theory or another because they contain so many suggestive but indefinite variables. Their very lack of verifiability has fueled belief that they harbor important hidden meanings.

Some theorists of the Ripper case have never given up the conviction that the earlier murders of Smith and Tabram were connected to it.

One famous member of the Metropolitan Police continued to insist that Smith was the Ripper's first victim. At least two Scotland Yard inspectors thought it a mistake to eliminate Tabram, and a number of profiling experts recently argued for her re-inclusion. Thus do the parameters of the case shift and change depending upon who is making the assessment and how a different perspective shows old facts in a different light.

Cases like that of Jack the Ripper serve as our secular myths. They stand in for religious myths, which are usually less flexible, less open to speculation. Through these mystery narratives we seek to understand our fates while nonetheless confronting the essential incomprehensibility of life and death.

Jack the Ripper gives us a place to exercise our desire for knowledge, our need to understand a world seemingly gone awry, and yet to nourish the equally pressing desire to keep the mystery alive.

Smith, whose painful death happened yesterday in 1888, might no longer be a part of the Jack the Ripper myth. She will, however, inescapably remain linked to a larger and more powerful human one.

Fred J. Abbate and Paula Marantz Cohen, professors at Drexel University, are co-organizers of the upcoming "Jack the Ripper through a Wider Lens: An Interdisciplinary Conference" (drexel.edu/honors/conferences/jtr/).