It is a Tuesday evening, October 16th, 1888.
And we are in Mile End, which is a hamlet just
on the eastern edge of the Whitechapel district
in London. Setting the scene perfectly. You know,
the fog is rolling in as it tends to do in literally
every story about this era. But. We aren't standing
over a body in a dark alleyway. We aren't at
Scotland Yard looking at a murder board. No,
we are definitely not. We are standing at the
front door of a very normal, very terrified civilian
house. And that's the thing that always gets
me about this specific moment in history. We
tend to mythologize the Ripper case as this grand
gothic opera. Right, the gas lights and the cobblestone.
Exactly. But the most significant piece of evidence,
and perhaps the only genuine piece of evidence,
didn't appear at a crime scene? No, it didn't.
It arrived in the Evening Post, delivered to
a builder's home. A builder named George Lusk.
And I think we really have to start with the
package itself, because unlike the hundreds of
letters the police were drowning in... Oh, there
were thousands, yeah. Yeah, thousands of scribbled
threats from cranks. But this was different.
This was a three -dimensional object, a small
box wrapped in brown paper postmarked London.
And the sensory experience of opening that box
is something the history books sort of sanitize
or gloss over entirely. Right. Because Luss opens
it and he isn't hit with a written threat immediately.
He's hit with a smell. A very specific smell.
Right. It's the pungent, overwhelming smell of
spirits. cheap gin or wine used for preservation.
And inside, nestled in that dampness, is a soft,
squishy biological specimen. Half of a human
kidney. Just sitting there. It is a grotesque
physical intrusion into a private home. It's
horrifying. And accompanying this horrific object
is a letter. A letter that strips away all the
saucy jack theatrics we usually associate with
the case. No date. No Dear Boss. Just a header
that functions as a return address. Right. From
hell. From hell. Not a street name. not a district,
just a state of eternal damnation. It is without
a doubt one of the most chilling artifacts in
criminal history. It changes the genre of the
story from a mystery to a straight -up horror.
And that is exactly what we are deep diving into
today. We have a massive stack of sources to
get through lots of ground to cover Yeah, we've
got forensic handwriting reports from the 19th
century in modern -day We have pathology reports
on that kidney which by the way are wild truly
bizarre and the historical records regarding
George Lusk So the mission for this deep dive
is to answer a singular nagging question the
big one in a sea of thousands of fake ripper
letters Why is this the one that experts? just
cannot dismiss. It's the outlier. That's the
best way to frame it. If you look at the Dear
Boss letter or the Saucy Jackie postcard, they
feel like they were written for an audience.
Yeah, they're highly performative. Exactly. The
From Hell letter, it feels private. It feels
like a genuine transmission from a completely
disordered mind. So let's contextualize the terror
before we analyze the handwriting. We can't really
understand the impact of this box without looking
at the calendar. The timeline is crucial here.
Mid -October, 1888. This is what historians call
the autumn of terror. Right. By mid -October,
the Whitechapel murders aren't just local news
anymore. They are a global panic. The whole world
is watching. Yes. You had Marianne Nichols murdered
at the end of August, which started the whispers.
Then Annie Chapman in early September. But then
things escalated. Grastically. You had the double
event on September 30th. The double event. Elizabeth
Stride and Catherine Eddowes. Two women killed
within an hour of each other. And that night
changed everything. Before the double event,
the police and the public, for that matter, thought
they were dealing with a gang. Right, the high
-rip gangs. Yes, the high -rip gangs of the East
End were notorious for extortion and violence.
So the early theories were that a group of men
were doing this. It made sense at the time. It
did. But after the double event, the ferocity
and the specific mutilations made them realize
they were hunting a lone, disorganized, highly
violent predator. And the police force. The Metropolitan
Police under Sir Charles Warren was failing.
Spectacularly. Just completely floundering. Warren
is a fascinating character in this failure, actually.
He was a military man, totally obsessed with
order, drilling his men like soldiers. Which
doesn't work for detective work. Not at all.
He was completely unequipped for urban policing.
He was destroying evidence like the famous Goulston
Street Graffito because he was afraid of anti
-Semitic riots. He wiped away writing on a wall
near a crime scene. Exactly, and the public lost
faith in him almost immediately. There was actually
a scandal right before this letter arrived where
the police tried to use bloodhounds to track
the killer. Oh, the bloodhound story. Yeah, it
turned into a total farce because the dogs got
lost. So you have the public seeing the police
running around with lost dogs while women are
being butchered in the streets. It was a disaster.
Which brings us directly to George Lusk. Because
the From Hell letter wasn't sent to Warren. No.
It wasn't sent to Inspector Aberlein. It was
sent to a civilian. Exactly. George Lusk was
the chairman of the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee.
And we should probably clarify what that was
because Vigilance Committee sounds a bit like
a superhero team or a lynch mob. Yeah. In reality,
it was basically a frantic neighborhood watch,
wasn't it? Pretty much. It was local business
owners, publicans, tradesmen. Builders like Lusk,
they were watching their profits vanish because
nobody would go out at night. People were terrified.
And they were frustrated that the home office
refused to offer a reward for capture. So they
pooled their own money, hired private detectives,
and organized patrols. And Lusk was the face
of this. He was a church warden, a respectable
man, suddenly thrust into the center of an absolute
nightmare. So by sending the package to Lusk,
The sender is making a very specific statement.
Highly specific. It's not catch me if you can,
Scotland Yard. It's I am watching you. It's a
localized haunt. It targets the community response
directly. It says you think you can organize.
You think you can patrol the streets. I can walk
right past your patrols, kill a woman, take her
organ and mail it to your chairman. It's an act
of dominance over the neighborhood itself. It
establishes a relationship between the killer
and the community that is much more intimate
than the relationship between the killer and
the state. Now, speaking of relationships, we
really have to talk about the brand because by
the time Lusk gets this kidney, the name Jack
the Ripper is already world famous. And this
is where we have to separate the mythology from
the reality. Right. The name Jack the Ripper
comes from the Dear Boss letter, which was received
by the Central News Agency in late September.
Dear Boss. I keep on hearing the police have
caught me, but they won't fix me just yet. It
reads like a script. It reads exactly like a
penny -dreadful villain. And there is a very
strong consensus among historians, and frankly
even among the police at the time, that Dear
Boss was a complete hoax. Specifically, a journalistic
hoax. The sources point to a journalist named
Tom Bulling. Tom Bulling of the Central News
Agency. The theory, which is backed by quite
a bit of correspondence from police officials
like Robert Anderson, is that the agency needed
to keep the story alive to sell copy. To sell
newspapers. Exactly. The Whitechapel Murderer
is a boring name. Jack the Ripper. That's a brand
that sells papers in New York and Paris. The
Dear Boss letter is written in this jaunty, confident
style. It uses Americanisms like boss and fix
me. It's almost cheerful. I love my work and
want to start again. It's a caricature. It creates
the image of the gentleman killer, the top hat,
the cape, the medical bag. The pop culture version.
Right. It suggests a killer who is intelligent,
literate, and playing a game. It frames the violence
as work or art. Now let's contrast that with
the text of the From Hell letter. When you look
at the facsimile of this letter, and for you
listening, Try to visualize a piece of dirty,
rough paper. The first thing that hits you is
the visual chaos. It's a mess. Ink blots everywhere.
Cramp spacing. The handwriting slants downwards.
Which graphologists, handwriting analysts often
associate with depression, fatigue, or a deteriorating
mental state. And the language is not jaunty.
It's guttural. Let's look at the opening. Mr.
Lusk. Sarah. S -O -R. Immediately, we are in
a completely different linguistic world. Sore.
is a phonetic spelling that suggests a specific
dialect, likely working class, possibly Irish.
We will get to that later. But notice the lack
of a date. Yes. The Dear Boss letter was dated.
This just says, from hell. It's not a location.
It's a state of being. And then the body of the
text. I'm going to read it exactly as it's written,
mistakes and all. I send you half the kidney
I took from one. Women preserved it for you to
the pieces it. I fried and ate it. It was very
nice. That sentence changed the entire psychological
profile of the killer. I fried and ate it. The
Dear Box writer talked about clipping ears. It
was about mutilation as a signature. The From
Hell writer talks about consumption. Cannibalism.
It's deeply disturbing. It moves the crime from
a lust murder or a statement to something primal.
It's an act of total possession. You don't just
kill the victim, you consume them. And the spelling
of nice. N -I -S -E. It's chilling because it
feels almost childish. It's that exact juxtaposition
of childish misspelling and horrific content
that makes it feel so much more authentic than
the Polish Dear Boss. Right. A chaotic, disorganized
killer wouldn't write in copper plate script.
They would write like this. And the signature.
Or rather, the lack of one. This is the smoking
gun for me regarding the authorship debate. How
so? Well, if you are the killer and you know
the world is calling you Jack the Ripper and
you want fame, You sign it, Jack the Ripper.
But he doesn't. He signs it. Catch me when you
can, Mr. Lusk. Mr. Again, that phonetic shh sound.
He doesn't care about the brand. He doesn't care
about the nickname the papers invented. He is
entirely focused on Lusk. It suggests the author
of this letter is completely disconnected from
the media narrative that bullying and the others
were spinning. So we have a letter that sounds
authentic because it's messy, disturbing, and
ignores the media hype. But words are wind, right?
You can fake being illiterate. You can fake being
creepy. True. People sent hoax letters claiming
to be the killer all the time. But you can't
easily fake a kidney. Yeah. And this is where
the deep dive gets technical. We really need
to look at the pathology of that specimen. The
grim artifact itself. This is what separates
this letter from the thousands of others. Lusk
receives this box. He initially thinks it's a
prank. He actually thought it was a dog's kidney,
right? Yes. Put there by some medical students.
Which was a totally valid suspicion. Medical
students in Victorian London were notorious for
gallows humor, and they had easy access to organs.
Right. Lusk wants to throw it right in the fire.
He's disgusted. That would be too. But the vigilance
committee members, men like Joseph Aarons and
Harris, they stop him. They basically say, George,
look, we have to be sure. So they take it to
a doctor. They take it to a local doctor, Dr.
Frederick Wiles. So his assistant examines it
first. Then it goes to the heavy hitter, Dr.
Thomas Openshaw at the London Hospital. He is
the pathological curator. Exactly. And this is
where history gets muddy, because the newspapers
reported one thing and the medical records suggest
another. What did Openshaw actually find? The
press went completely wild. They ran headlines
saying, OpenShaw confirmed it was Catherine Eddow's
kidney, that it was from a woman of the exact
same age, same drinking habits. But that wasn't
exactly true. No. If you look at the contemporary
police reports, specifically from Inspector Swanson,
OpenShaw's actual findings were more conservative,
but honestly still damning. He confirmed it was
human. Yes. Not a dog, not a sheep. Human. And
he confirmed it was a left kidney. Which is highly
critical because Catherine Eddowes had her left
kidney removed by the killer. Now, let's talk
about Bright's disease. This comes up in every
single Ripper documentary, but what is it actually?
Bright's disease is a historical medical term
for a form of nephritis. Inflammation of the
kidneys. Yes. In the Victorian era, it was highly
correlated with chronic alcoholism. And physically,
what does it do? Physically, it changes the organ.
A healthy kidney is relatively smooth. A kidney
with Bright's disease becomes granular, tough,
and the cortex, the outer layer, thins out. It
looks visibly scarred. So it's visually and texturally
distinct from a normal kidney. Highly distinct.
Now, Katherine Etos was 46 years old and a known
alcoholic. Her autopsy noted that her remaining
right kidney showed clear signs of Bright's disease.
In the specimen sent to LUSK. Reports do vary
slightly, but the prevailing narrative in the
investigation files, and certainly the firm belief
of Major Smith of the city police at the time,
is that the kidney sent to Lusk also showed signs
of Breit's disease. So, if we play devil's advocate
for a second and say this is just a hoax, the
hoaxer would have to, A, acquire a human kidney,
B, ensure it's a left kidney, C, ensure it's
from a female, which OpenShot couldn't definitively
prove, but thought was likely. And D, ensure
it has this specific alcoholic disease that matches
the victim perfectly. The probabilities just
start to collapse. It's possible medical museums
had jars of diseased organs. A student could
have picked a gin kidney on purpose. But the
timing. Exactly. Two weeks after the murder.
The preservation in spirits. It aligns too perfectly.
Speaking of preservation, the letter says, preserved
it for you. Open Shaw noted the kidney was in
spirits. But not just spirits. This is a detail
that often gets completely missed. Openshaw noted
that the kidney wasn't preserved in a standard
medical preservative like formalin. It was in
wine or gin. Which heavily suggests it wasn't
just pulled off a shelf in a medical school.
Right, because if a medical student stole a sesame,
it would likely be floating in formalbehyde or
a similar medical compound. Exactly. This was
preserved in hard liquor. That speaks to a killer
acting in a domestic setting using whatever he
had on hand. I fried and ate it. The very idea
that he kept the other half for dinner implies
he had the time and the privacy to actually do
that. It implies a terrifying level of comfort
with the atrocity, and it brings us right back
to the writer's profile. Because if we accept
the kidney is real, then the handwriting on that
letter is the handwriting of the actual killer.
And that handwriting has been analyzed by modern
experts who found some very specific very strange
quirks. We're talking about the literacy versus
deception debate. This is a huge area of contention
among historians and linguists. When you first
look at the letter, it looks illiterate. Right.
Kidnan is missing the Y. Nif is missing the E.
But linguists point out something called cognitive
dissonance in the spelling. How so? Well, take
the word nif, K -N -I -F. He drops the E, but
he keeps the K. Now, the K in knife is silent.
If you were truly uneducated and writing purely
by sound, you would just write N -I -F. That
makes total sense. The fact that he includes
the silent K means he knows how the word is spelled
visually, but he is actively choosing to truncate
it. Same with wilt for a while. W -H -I -L. He
keeps the silent age. Exactly. This leads to
two competing theories. Theory A, it's a disguise.
Someone pretending to be uneducated. Right. This
is an educated man, maybe a doctor, maybe a gentleman,
pretending to be uneducated to throw the police
off the scent. He's slumming it on paper. And
theory B. Theory B is that it is the work of
a partly functional but deranged individual.
Someone who actually had schooling in their youth,
but has deteriorated mentally. So they remember
the shape of the words, but their execution is
breaking down. Exactly. The brain knows the K
is there, but the hand forgets the E. This brings
us to the Irish connection. I watched the documentary
where forensic handwriting expert Michelle Dresbold
analyzes this, and her theory blew my mind. Michelle
Dresbold is fantastic. She did a deep dive for
the History Channel. She identified something
called the invasive loop. What's that? Look at
the letter Y in the From Hell note. In standard
English cursive of the time, the tail of the
Y goes down and loops up. In this letter, the
loop is heavily exaggerated. It's invasive. Meaning
it cuts into other lines. It swings back and
cuts right through the other words on the line
below it. And apparently this isn't just a sign
of being a messy writer. It's a sign of where
you went to school. It tracks perfectly with
Irish copybook styles from the late 19th century.
In Irish schools at the time, that specific flourish
was extremely common. And when you combine that
with the phonetic spellings we talked about,
mister for mister, preserved for preserved, you
start to build a really compelling profile of
an Irish author. Preserved, P -R -A -S -A -R
-V -E -D. If you say that out loud with a broad
Irish accent. It sounds exactly like preserved.
Which leads us to the one suspect who actually
fits this specific bizarre Venn diagram, Francis
Tumbley. Francis Tumulty, he is a real piece
of work. To say the least. He was an American
quack doctor, but he was of Irish descent. He
was in London during the murders, and he was
actually arrested on suspicion of the crimes.
He wasn't just a random suspect swept up in a
dragnet, though. He had a very specific psychological
fixation. He absolutely hated women. We have
historical testimony that he would go into wild
tirades at dinner parties about the sinfulness
of women. But more importantly, embrace yourself
for this, he collected uteri. He collected body
parts. He kept a collection of preserved female
reproductive organs in jars. He showed them to
guests. He was actively proud of them. OK, so
let's track this. We have a guy who collects
female organs, hates women. is in Whitechapel
and is Irish -American, and we have a letter
written in an Irish dialect sent with a female
organ. It's the strongest circumstantial chain
we have for any suspect regarding the Lusk letter
specifically. Tumblety fled the country shortly
after being released on bail. He went to France,
right? He went to France, then sneaked back to
the States. And the murder stopped. But here's
the kicker regarding Tumblety in the handwriting.
If Tumblety wrote the From Hell letter, he definitely
didn't write Dear Boss. They are completely mutually
exclusive. The handwriting is fundamentally different.
So if Tumulty is the Ripper, then Jack the Ripper
doesn't exist. Jack is the fiction. Yes, Jack
is a literary invention. The Fromhill Cannibal
is the reality. It's a bifurcated reality. We
have the media monster and we have the actual
man. And there is one witness account that ties
into this Tumulty theory perfectly. The Emily
Marsh incident. This is a detail that often gets
left out of the general summaries, but it's vital
to the story. This happened the day before Lusk
received the kidney. October 15th. Emily Marsh
is running a shop on the Mile End Road. Which
is in the exact same area the letter was postmarked
from. Right. A man walks in. He's tall, about
six foot. He's wearing a long clerical style
coat. He has a dark beard. And this matches the
description of Francis Tumulty. It matches him
perfectly. Tumblety was known for dressing flamboyantly
and was very tall for the era. And he speaks
with an Irish accent. And he asks her, very specifically,
for the home address of Mr. George Lusk. Marsh
gives it to him, he writes it down in a little
notebook, and he leaves abruptly. It's chilling.
It suggests the killer was actively hunting Lusk.
Not to kill him, but to deliver the message.
He was scouting the location to make sure the
package arrived properly. It turns the From Hell
letter from just a random piece of mail into
the climax of a stalking event. But playing devil's
advocate here, Lusk was a public figure by this
point. His name was in the papers constantly.
That's entirely true. Lusk was receiving dozens
of threats. This Irish man in the shop could
have been anyone. It could have been a crank
who read about Lusk in The Star or The Telegraph.
Right. But when you layer it with the tumbledy
suspect profile, the preserved spelling and the
physical kidney, The Emily Marsh sighting feels
like a piece of the puzzle that fits just a little
too well to ignore. It's tantalizing. It puts
a face to the sender, a tall man in a long coat,
speaking with an Irish lilt, clutching a notebook,
and likely clutching a box with a kidney in it.
That is a horrifying image. Speaking of things
we can't be sure of, or rather things we are
very sure are fake, we have to mention the Maybrook
Diary briefly, because I feel like whenever the
From Hell letter comes up, People mention this
diary. The diary of Jack the Ripper. This surfaced
in the 1990s. It was allegedly written by a Liverpool
cotton merchant named James Maybrick. And in
the diary, he supposedly confesses to the murders.
He does. And he specifically references eating
the kidney. He writes about the From Hell letter
directly. But the handwriting doesn't match at
all. It doesn't match the From Hell letter, and
it doesn't match the Dear Boss letter either.
So it's essentially debunked. Most experts, including
the Kirkus Reviews and major historical societies,
consider it a complete hoax. A modern hoax. Yes.
Scientific testing on the ink was inconclusive,
but heavily leaned toward being modern. It's
essentially historical fan fiction. But it's
interesting because it shows how deeply the From
Hell letter has penetrated the lore. Exactly.
If you're going to fake a Ripper diary, you absolutely
have to include the kidney. It's the ultimate
touchstone of authenticity. You just can't tell
the story without it. It really is. The kidney
is the anchor. You can fake a note. You can't
easily fake a kidney with Bragg's disease. That's
the bottom line. The physical evidence simply
trumps the graphology, the linguistics, and the
witness descriptions. The biological reality
of that organ is what keeps historians and pathologists
coming back to this letter. So let's zoom out
a bit. We've looked at the evidence. Now let's
look at the legacy. Because the actual phrase
From Hell has taken on a life of its own entirely.
It has transcended the forensic files and become
part of our cultural language. It's the title
of the definitive artistic work on the subject.
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's graphic novel
From Hell. An absolute masterpiece. And notice
the title. Moore didn't call it Jack the Ripper.
He didn't call it Saucy Jack. He called it From
Hell. Why do you think that is? Because Moore
was interested in the psychology, not the cartoon
villain. The graphic novel and the Johnny Depp
movie that followed, although they are very different
animals, uses the From Hell letter as a window
into the killer's tortured mind. The letter represents
the true madness. Exactly. Professor Elizabeth
Ho has written about this extensively. She argues
that the letter transcends being just evidence
to become a symbol. It shifts the entire focus
from the caricature to the grim demonic It grounds
it. Dear Boss is a comic book villain. From Hell
is a horror movie. It forces us to confront the
fact that this wasn't a game. A woman was brutally
mutilated. An organ was stolen. And a man, a
damaged and incredibly dangerous man, sat in
a room somewhere in the East End, likely with
a glass of gin and a piece of human flesh on
his table, and wrote a note to the guy trying
to stop him. That image. I fried and ate it.
It sticks with you. It's supposed to. It was
explicitly designed to terrorize. And 130 years
later, it still does exactly that. It still works.
We've been deep in the fog for a long time now.
And I feel like I've walked the streets of Whitechapel
myself. So let's try to wrap this up with a big
takeaway. Sounds good. What does the From Hell
letter tell us that absolutely nothing else in
the case does? The takeaway is that history is
often written by the loudest voices. OK. The
Dear Boss letter was loud. It was catchy. It
gave us Jack. It gave us the top hat. The media
sensation. But the From How letter is the quiet,
nasty whisper that is probably the actual truth.
We move from a media -fueled sensation to a potentially
semi -literate, deranged man writing, Sore. And
the killing remains the grotesque anchor for
all of it. It is the physical evidence that refuses
to be explained away. You can argue about handwriting
until you're blue in the face, but you can't
argue with a kidney exhibiting Bright's disease
delivered two weeks after a murder. It's the
one tangible thing that keeps the from hell letter
from being thrown into the hoax pile with the
other thousand letters. Precisely. It demands
to be taken seriously. So here's the final thought
I want to leave everyone with. And for you listening,
it's a bit of a mind bender. Go for it. We all
have this image of Jack the Ripper, the cape.
The top hat. The medical bag. The sophisticated
gentleman stalking the slums. That image comes
largely from the Dear Boss letter and the massive
media frenzy it created. Right. That is the cultural
icon we've built. But if the From Hell letter
is the only real one, and the Dear Boss letter
was just a journalist's invention, then does
that mean Jack the Ripper never actually existed?
That is the lingering question. I mean, the murders
definitely happened. The killer existed. But
the character. The Jack we think we know. He
might just be an illusion. Maybe he was just
a ghost story created to sell newspapers, while
the real butcher, the man who couldn't spell
knife, the man who signed himself sore, the man
who ate a human kidney, was watching from the
shadows laughing at us for chasing a phantom.
That is a terrifying thought, and probably the
most accurate one we have. We spent a century
hunting a gentleman when we should have been
hunting a cannibal. On that cheerful note, thank
you for joining us on this deep dive. Always
a pleasure. We'll see you next time. Stay curious.