Before dawn on August 31, 1888, a carman on his way to work mistook a body in a Whitechapel gateway for a dropped tarpaulin — the first of five unsolved killings that a hoax letter would later hand a name nobody has ever matched to a face

Charles Cross had a shift to get to. What stopped him was a shape in a gateway on Buck's Row. He took it, at first, for a dropped tarpaulin.

It was about 3:40 in the morning on August 31, 1888. Cross crossed the street for a closer look, and another carman on his way to the same market, Robert Paul, arrived within a minute or two. Neither man was carrying a light. What they found, once their eyes adjusted, was a woman lying on her back, her skirts disturbed, her throat cut. They went for a policeman rather than touch her.

Who was the woman in Buck's Row?

Her name was Mary Ann Nichols. Friends called her Polly.

She was 43 and had been born in London. At eighteen she married a printer's machinist, William Nichols, and the couple had five children before separating around 1880 (William later blamed drink for the breakup); by the summer of 1888 she was moving between common lodging houses in Spitalfields, taking casual domestic work when she could get it. She had spent that final evening, by her own account to a friend named Emily Holland, trying to raise fourpence for a bed. Holland saw her on Whitechapel Road a little after 2:30 a.m., unsteady but walking, and that was the last sighting before Buck's Row.

What happened after Cross and Paul found her

Police Constable John Neil reached the scene within minutes and sent for a doctor. Rees Ralph Llewellyn arrived shortly before 4 a.m., pronounced her dead, and judged she had not been dead more than half an hour. Her body went to the mortuary on Old Montague Street, where a laundry mark on her petticoat, stamped "Lambeth Workhouse P.R.," eventually led to identification.

The inquest ran into September, under coroner Wynne Baxter. His jury returned the standard formula for a case with no suspect: willful murder by a person or persons unknown. It is the verdict that has stood ever since.

Why one killing on one street became a national obsession

Nichols would not stay a single, contained tragedy. Over the next ten weeks, four more women were murdered within roughly a mile of Buck's Row: Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes, and Mary Jane Kelly, each case sharing enough in its method that police and press eventually treated all five as the work of one man. Historians now call these the canonical five, a label that admits what it settles: which killings belong to the pattern, not who did them.

The Metropolitan Police, joined by the City of London force once Eddowes's murder fell inside its square mile of jurisdiction, ran the largest manhunt London had seen. Detectives interviewed more than 2,000 people. They investigated roughly 300 suspects and detained around 80. None was charged.

Where the name actually came from

For the first weeks, London's papers didn't have a name to give the killer, beyond "Leather Apron," borrowed from an early and unfounded rumor about a local bootmaker.

That changed on September 27, when the Central News Agency received a letter dated two days earlier. Written in red ink, riddled with spelling errors real or performed, it boasted about the killings, promised more, and threatened to "clip the ladys ears off." It was signed "Jack the Ripper."

The agency forwarded it to Scotland Yard on the 29th. Once police released facsimiles to the press in early October, the signature was everywhere, and it displaced every rival nickname within days.

Was the letter even real?

Almost certainly not, in the sense of being written by the killer.

Senior police officials at the time already suspected the "Dear Boss" letter was a newsroom invention, meant to keep the story alive and papers selling. In 1931, a journalist named Fred Best said he and a colleague at The Star, Tom Bullen, had written it themselves, along with a follow-up postcard signed the same way. That account is secondhand and decades removed from the event, so treat it as one man's late recollection rather than proof. What is not in dispute is that Scotland Yard's own chief inspector at the time, Robert Anderson, believed the letter was a journalist's fabrication, and said so in his memoirs.

There is a complication. In 2018, forensic linguist Andrea Nini argued that close analysis ties the "Dear Boss" letter and a follow-up postcard to a single author, which would rule out separate hoaxers copying each other. That finding says the two documents share a writer. It says nothing about whether that writer ever held a knife.

Who did Scotland Yard suspect?

By 1894, the case was cold enough that a senior officer felt safe naming names for the file rather than for the public.

Chief Constable Melville Macnaghten wrote an internal memorandum listing three men he considered stronger suspects than a factory worker then wrongly accused in the press. One of them was Aaron Kosminski, a Polish-born barber living in Whitechapel who had been committed to an asylum. Macnaghten offered no evidence a court would recognize, and none of the three was ever arrested for the murders. His memo has nonetheless anchored more than a century of amateur and professional speculation, some of it built on documents nobody else has ever produced.

That speculation has never stopped growing. More than a hundred suspects have been proposed since, from dockworkers to a member of the royal household to, memorably, Lewis Carroll — a list less useful as a shortlist than as a record of how badly people have wanted an answer. A large share of the City of London force's original case files were destroyed in the Blitz, which means whatever might have settled it is very possibly gone rather than merely unread.

What became of the street itself

Buck's Row got a new name within four years. On October 25, 1892, it was renumbered and renamed Durward Street, a plain response to the notoriety a single murder had bolted onto an otherwise unremarkable East End lane. The Board School that stood there in 1888 is still standing, converted into flats. In 2021, London's transport authority opened a new station entrance onto Durward Street, close to where Nichols's body was found. Nobody involved in 1888 could have anticipated that, and they would probably have found it absurd.

The case that opened there has never closed in any formal sense; it has simply run out of people who could still be charged. Podcasts, walking tours, documentaries, and a self-sustaining industry of professional "Ripperology" keep the file open in every sense except the legal one, arguing DNA claims and handwriting analyses that a defense lawyer would tear apart in an afternoon if there were ever a defendant to sit for one. What endures isn't a solution. It's the letter, and the name it gave a stranger who was never required to answer to it.

Sources

• Mary Ann Nichols, Wikipedia, consulted August 2026
• Jack the Ripper, Wikipedia, consulted August 2026
• Dear Boss letter, Wikipedia, consulted August 2026
• Durward Street, Wikipedia, consulted August 2026