Excerpts

Introduction   While the world has had no shortage of murderers, with Cain wasting no time in getting humanity started on its bloodstained path, none has imposed himself on the public consciousness as indelibly as Jack the Ripper. Most experts, known in this very specific area of scholarship as Ripperologists, believe that the fiend committed his atrocities during a relatively short period of time in 1888, yet his sobriquet still resonates throughout the world today.   It is reasonable to ask why this remains true after more than a century and a quarter. Certainly, there have been countless other killers whose names have screamed at us in headlines over the years, holding our attention for a while before fading and, mostly, disappearing.   We may remember Adam Lanza now, for having committed the incomprehensible slaughter of twenty children and six adults at a school in Newtown, Connecticut, in 2012, but only devoted scholars of crime will recall Andrew Kehoe, who murdered thirty-eight children and five adults when he blew up a school in Michigan in 1927.   American gangsters such as Al Capone, Bonnie and Clyde, Whitey Bulger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, and John Gotti are legendary figures in America but are virtually unknown in the rest of the world. The same is largely true for the icons of the old Western frontier, where Jesse James, Billy the Kid, the Younger brothers, and Doc Holliday became the subject of purple prose newspaper accounts that captivated East Coast readers, leading to dime novels and motion picture portrayals that reimagined vicious thugs as semi-heroic characters. None of these villains sends a chill down the spine, as popular media have sanitized their reputations and deeds.   Equally uninspiring of horror in the present time are British killers such as Fred and Rose West, who are known to have tortured and murdered at least eleven women and girls until they were brought to trial in 1994, their exploits garishly recounted in the news media. Also the merest footnote to the history of serial killers is Dr. Harold Shipman, reputedly the murderer of approximately two hundred and fifty people, mostly his patients, whose wills he forged so that he could inherit their valuables. Some may recall the newspapers' colorful title of the Moors Murderers, but few remember the real names of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley, described at her trial as the Most Evil Woman in Britain. Other names that became famous at one time, mainly because they became the subjects of books or movies, are Burke and Hare, gravediggers who were paid for corpses for medical examination and soon found it easier to kill people than dig them up; Constance Kent, who murdered a child when she was sixteen, a case so notorious in its time (1860) that elements were used by Wilkie Collins in The Moonstone , by Charles Dickens in The Mystery of Edwin Drood , and in numerous other novels; Peter William Sutcliffe, better known as the Yorkshire Ripper, convicted of murdering thirteen women; and Madeleine Smith, whose trial for poisoning her lover allowed her freedom when the jury returned a verdict of "not proven." She was sensationalized in Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady and in the 1950 David Lean film Madeleine .   Better known in the United States, often because journalists bestowed colorful names on them, are such infamous serial killers as The Hillside Stranglers, Kenneth Bianchi and Angelo Buono; the Son of Sam, David Berkowitz; the Co-ed Killer, Edmund Kemper; the BTK (Bind, Torture, and Kill) Killer, Dennis Rader; the Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez; the Milwaukee Cannibal, Jeffrey Dahmer; the Green River Killer, Gary Ridgway; John Wayne Gacy and Ted Bundy, prolific murderers who somehow eluded colorful titles; and Charles Manson, probably the most fearsome American psychopath of the twentieth century, his crimes splashed along headlines for years, partially because of the unspeakable brutality of the crimes and partially because of the fame and beauty of one of the victims, Sharon Tate.   There is a seemingly limitless number of people who have committed untold numbers of hei-nous acts throughout the long history of Homo sapiens, a species almost unique in its ability to kill within the species for the sheer pleasure of it. With so many others having murdered in even greater numbers than Jack the Ripper, and some equally brutal (or worse, engaging in unspeak-ably depraved torture of living victims, a practice almost entirely eschewed by Saucy Jack), why does he continue to maintain his place at the top of the public's radar?   While students of criminology are not unanimous in attributing the number of the Ripper's victims, with five apparently accepted universally, but one, two, three, or four others also credited to him by various scholars, it is generally agreed that all the murders occurred during the autumn of 1888 (again, with outliers claiming at least an additional year at either end). The victims were all prostitutes in London's East End, a ghetto teeming with the poorest segment of the population. The dark, narrow alleyways, often ending in cul-de-sacs, were perfect venues in which to commit an act of violence--or a transaction of a sexual nature, performed by a member of the largest profession of the neighborhood. The noxious fumes of coal stoves and fireplaces, as well as the factories located in the area, combined to provide an almost permanently darkened sky, a smog known as London particular. The women of the night, prowling the streets, looking for partners to pay them enough for a glass of warming gin, were perfect victims, willing--no, eager--to slip off to a darkened corner to quickly ply their trade. Although police patrolled regularly throughout the night, it was seldom the cream of the force, and the odds of them catching a criminal in the act, with visibility frequently limited to two or three feet, were slim.   Since so few cared about the victims of the Ripper's carnage while they were alive, why has their fate continued to resonate today? A likely reason is that he was never caught. Having spread a tsunami of terror for a short time, he disappeared completely, leaving his identity to be theorized, discussed, argued, and written about for decade after decade. It did not hurt his legacy of notoriety that he frequently taunted the police, with the complicity of the local press, by sending letters warning them of forthcoming attacks and daring them to catch him if they can.   The frisson of terror evoked by his name, Jack the Ripper--so much more chilling than merely Jack the Killer or Jack the Stabber--stays in the memory, and on the tongue, so easily. He was written about in such extreme terms, first of course in newspapers, but then in magazine articles and books, that he provided endless fodder for those who became intrigued by him. Theories about his identity were rampant, with clues clutched to advance one theory, while other possible pieces of evidence were ignored if they suggested that someone else was the genuine article. Other Ripperologists rushed to discredit the first theory and advance their own, which suffered the same fate at the hands of still other students of the crimes. Jack the Ripper has now been "proven" to be any one of at least a half-dozen people by various authors and scholars.   This collection has articles describing the area of the atrocities, accounts of the murders, and theories about the identity of Red Jack by some of the world's leading experts on the subject. There also are contemporary reports from newspapers of the day. Taken together, they will provide a reasonably clear picture of the real-life events that inspired so much fiction about the incidents and the demented individual at the heart of them. For the most comprehensive guide to all the facts, if you are interested to read in far greater detail than offered here, I recommend The Complete Jack the Ripper by Donald Rumbelow.   The fiction contained in this tome has a wide range. While planned as a volume of crime stories, the almost mythical level at which Jack has been perceived has compelled me to include some of the memorable tales that present him as ageless as his reputation. Many theories about why Jack quit so abruptly have suggested he moved to a different country, or to a different time. It was impossible to resist these stories by several masters of the form.   Finally, proving yet again that Jack the Ripper is as timeless as fear, there are new stories, written especially for this volume by some of today's most distinguished authors--Jeffery Deaver, Loren D. Estleman, Lyndsay Faye, Stephen Hunter, Anne Perry, and Daniel Stashower--and I am grateful to them all for adding to the literature about one of the most singularly vile creatures ever to degrade the planet.   Prepare to be unnerved.   --Otto Penzler Excerpted from The Big Book of Jack the Ripper All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.