Was Jack the Ripper Queen Victoria’s grandson?

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As recent years attest, royal scandals have a habit of coming to light. But what if the mother of all royal scandals is still waiting to be revealed? Could it be that an heir to the British throne, a grandson of Queen Victoria, might have lived a double life as a serial killer? It may sound far-fetched, but for several decades, many people have claimed that Prince Albert Victor, also known as Eddie, was in fact the notorious Victorian murderer, Jack the Ripper. Could they be right? Welcome to Series 3 of History's Greatest Conspiracy Theories from History Extra. I'm Rob Attar, and in today's episode, I'm joined by Dr Drew Gray of the University of Northampton to investigate the most shocking candidate for the Ripper murders.

Just to begin with, what do we actually know about the killer who's popularly referred to as Jack the Ripper?

Drew Gray (2:26)

Well, we know very little actually about the Whitechapel murderer who's called Jack the Ripper. There's been so many people that have been suspected of being the killer, but we have very little forensic evidence. We have quite a few witness descriptions, but there's some similarities, but they're not entirely consistent.

There's no smoking gun or dripping knife. There's nothing like that, so it does allow for a lot of speculation on the case because we really can't be clear about who the killer was.

Rob Attar (2:54)

Can we even be sure about how many victims this killer had, or even if it was only just one killer?

Drew Gray (2:59)

They're both very good questions, actually. I mean, they were generally seen as five canonical victims, and those five women, most experts on the case would accept, were killed by the same man, and it is generally seen to be a man, though there have been suggestions that it was a woman. There have been suggestions that more than one killer was involved, but there's very little evidence for any of it, but there's very little evidence to suggest that, and it's quite unlikely serial killers are generally not more than one person. The police file that's held at the National Archives in Kew contains more than those five women, and probably most experts today would accept that we could probably make that list stretch to six, but there's really no consensus over the others.

Rob Attar (3:50)

Was it unusual in the late Victorian era to have such a high-profile crime that remained unsolved?

Drew Gray (3:56)

That's difficult. We probably think that more crimes are solved than they actually are even in our 21st century with all the technology and forensics that's available to police today. Solving a stranger murder series that the Whitechapel murders are, in the sense that there's no obvious connection between the killer and his victims, that's always incredibly difficult. If we look back at other serial killers, people like Stephen Wright or the Yorkshire Ripper, for example, again, the fact that these murderers attack individuals who are not connected makes it much more difficult for the police to solve, because the police will immediately, if the murder is taking place, look for the close family. Close family work links, that kind of thing, and that's not easy to do. So the police across the 19th century had problem solving crimes like these, although these are unusual that these sorts of crimes don't exist. But in 1888, in the period when the Ripper murders took place, there was another series of murders in London, bodies found in the Thames, known as the Thames Torso Murders or the Thames Torso Mystery, and that's not been solved either. So there are precedents for not solving serial killings or unusual crimes.