Introduction

The purpose of this blog is to act as the chronicle of an investigation. I have decided to combine two things that I greatly enjoy together in order to, hopefully, understand both better and perhaps shed some new light in places that have been largely dark for over a hundred years.

In the autumn of 1888 London was gripped by fear as women were killed and mutilated in the east ends Whitechapel district. The killer would be dubbed Jack the Ripper after using the moniker to sign a single letter to the London Press. The case grew cold by the end of that year and has remained unsolved for over a hundred and twenty years.

The year before the Ripper scare, England bore another legend. This one on the side of good. In 1887 Sherlock Holmes first appeared in the story "A Study in Scarlet". He used deduction to solve impossible crimes. From the smallest details, Holmes could determine everything about the crime and the criminal. By the time Holmes returned to 1890, the Ripper had vanished, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle never had the two meet.

Several films and non-canon stories have been published in which the great detective tracks down the elusive serial killer, but in each version, Holmes suspect is the creation of fantasy- with the stories scribes often knowing very little about the Whitechapel Murders, and inventing people and clues for Holmes to use in his investigation.

What I intend to do is different. I will attempt to use the methods of Sherlock Holmes to find Jack the Ripper. I make no claim to be as brilliant or encyclopedic as Holmes, and often where he would be able to spout an answer I will have to perform research. However, I am of the firm belief that for too long the community of researchers who are interested in solving the Ripper case have become so entrenched in suspects and finding a "smoking gun", that probably does not exist, that they've allowed the minutiae of the case to vanish.

The Devil is in the details as they say, and so too, I believe, is the Ripper.