Jack

I am nobody. To you, I would be one of the hundreds of faces that you see every day. If by any chance our paths happened to cross, I doubt you would acknowledge me at all. You wouldn’t be able to guess, by my modest appearance alone, exactly what I am capable of.

The truth is that I am deeply and desperately sick. My sickness is no less severe than a physical one such as cancer, and I certainly have no more control over it. But my disease is in my mind, not my body. I have a need, swelling deep within my soul, which must be satisfied.

From a young age, I learnt to control it. I knew that I wasn’t normal, that nobody would understand me or accept me for what I am. I hid in the shadow of my wealthy family, pretending that I was just like everybody else. I observed and imitated the normal behaviour of my peers, keeping my sickness to myself. Not a living soul knows what I am, or what I do.

Tonight, I know that it must happen once more. Each night, I tell myself, will be the last, and yet here I stand again, trusty knife cool and deadly in my hand. Now all I have to do is wait.

You may not recognise me by name or appearance, but the chances are high that you are familiar with my work. You talk about me non-stop. Barely a day goes by that you don’t hear mention of it. You have sensationalised much of it yourselves, greedy little swines that you are. You thrive on the danger and the mystery. Some of you even try to replicate my work, which I might fancy as rather flattering if you didn’t get it all so wrong. I don’t wish to be held accountable for your messes. Leave it to the professionals, darlings, I beg of you.

You have many names for me. At first we had the rather unoriginal ‘Whitechapel Murderer’, followed by the slightly more creative (although unforgivably inaccurate) ‘Leather Apron’. But by a country mile, my favourite alias thus far is ‘Jack the Ripper’. Has something of a ring to it, don’t you think?

Slow, feminine footsteps alert me that the time has almost come. Just come a little bit closer, darling. My smile widens.

You cannot hope to understand my sickness. I don’t expect you to. All you must know is that it is a compulsion: much like others feel the need to smoke a cigarette, so do I feel the need to kill. It is not often, but when it comes it completely takes me over. It is all I can think about until I can satisfy my urge.

I step out from the shadows and come face-to-face with a middle-aged woman dressed entirely in black, unsteady and unaware; obviously intoxicated. This is what makes her absolutely perfect.

“Good evening, madam,” I greet her, startling her from her hazy consciousness. My heart pounds beneath my breast as her cloudy eyes rise to mine.

She barely even has the function to reply. There are times when murder is just far too easy, but sadly these instances are not quite frequent enough, and I don’t have the time to savour them as I would like to.

The rather peculiar aspect of my compulsions is that while I am succumbing to them, I have very little control over what I am doing. It is as if the knife itself pulls my body behind it, slashing and tugging as it goes. My conscious mind is entirely focussed on the thrill of the sport, revelling in the sound of screams and the joy of watching a life fade away. And oh, the blood. You can’t even imagine the beauty of it, crimson and unspoilt. The last drops of innocence contained within the body of a whore. I admire it as my knife leads me this way and that.

Media coverage is far too focussed on the Whys. Why does The Ripper target prostitutes? Why does The Ripper mutilate their bodies? Why does it matter? It doesn’t, but I will tell you anyway: Prostitutes are easy targets. They roam empty streets in the early hours of the morning, quite alone and quite vulnerable. They have no sense of danger; their wellbeing depends on the needs of strangers just like myself. In addition to this, not many tend to care about them. Another prostitute goes missing or ends up dead and the world keeps turning.

As for the mutilations, well, once again that is down to the knife. It takes a life of its own for every life that it takes. It grows stronger. At first the knife was a part of me, but now it is a part of The Ripper. It is almost its own being. I am merely an enabler. Once The Ripper takes over, I am just as helpless as the girls whose flesh we are cutting into.

Once the screaming has stopped, I stand up and step back, admiring the pretty picture as I always do. People don’t appreciate that killing is an art. The streets of Whitechapel are my canvas, and the beautiful, beautiful blood is my paint. I take one last, lingering glance at the body, and then I run.

The thing that I find most amusing is the general assumptions made by supposed experts. Detectives and criminologists and journalists. They are all quite insistent that The Ripper is a madman of some sort. He is a deranged butcher, or a tyrannical surgeon. To think that these ‘experts’ would walk straight past me in an empty street without so much as a passing glance rather tickles me. After all, they are wasting their time looking for a tall, shabby-looking man, possibly with a moustache, possibly with fair hair. So why on Earth would they ever look twice at me?

It is quite easy to get away with murder, it would seem, so long as you are young and attractive and come from a wealthy family.

After all, who would ever suspect Jack the Ripper to be the coroner’s daughter?