Jack the Ripper and Black Magic

7 Whitechapel Secret Service Sir Charles Warren, Metropolitan Police Commissioner during the Whitechapel events, quit under political pressure1 as the Ripper’s last victim, Mary Jane Kelly, was murdered on November 9, 1888. Warren, unlike his senior police colleagues in later years, did not leave a detailed public record of Jack the Ripper theories. However, he did note an official statement for the attention of both the Home and Foreign Office on secret societies. It has fueled conspiracy theories and historic beliefs since the official files were released during the late 1970s.

Warren’s rank in regular Freemasonry has also led to conjecture on a conspiracy to murder destitute East End prostitutes — a plot supposedly hatched at the top level of the ruling classes, not excluding the Royal Family. There is no evidence to support such imaginative views. The mutilations create an impression of a serial killer who is sophisticated and clever, yet a maniac who escaped the joint efforts of Victorian London’s Metropolitan and City Police forces, Scotland Yard’s Criminal Investigation Department and its Special Branch.

Compared to modern serial killers, Jack the Ripper worked in a very small part of the East End. He escaped detection, yet he came to the attention of a vigilant and well-organized police structure. It is precisely because the best detectives were employed on the Whitechapel murders that the case became such a baffling mystery.

At the height of the Whitechapel murders, responding to a dispatch to the Foreign Office from Sir A. Paget, the British ambassador to Vienna, on October 13, 1888, Sir Charles Warren discussed a European suspect associated with anarchists who had been brought to the attention of Scotland Yard. He included an opinion on a motive for the murders: “As Mr. Matthews [the Home Secretary] is aware I have for some time past inclined to the idea that the murders may possibly be done by a secret society, as the only logical solution of the question, but I would not understand this being done by a socialist because the last murders were obviously done by someone desiring to bring discredit on the Jews and socialists or Jewish socialists.”2 Warren’s statement is in marked contrast to that of his Assistant Commissioner and head of CID, Robert Anderson. Later in 1910, Anderson formulated and published a semiofficial theory that Jack the Ripper was a “low-class Polish Jew.” He noted that Scotland 146