Imagine holding a piece of mail that basically
single -handedly invented the modern serial killer.
Yeah, and we mean literally no weapon, no DNA
or anything, just a standard 1888 postcard. Right.
Smeared with red ink, featuring just a few scribbled
words that, you know, managed to terrify an entire
nation. And totally derail a police investigation
for well over a century. It's just wild. So welcome
to this custom tailored deep dive crafted specifically
for you. Glad you're here with us today. We are
pulling all our insights entirely from a really
comprehensive Wikipedia article. Yeah, it details
the history, the text and the massive controversy
surrounding the the Saucy Jackie postcard. And
our mission here isn't just to recount some gruesome
historical event just for the shock value. No,
definitely not. We're going to examine how a
simple handwritten taunt became this huge cornerstone
of true crime history. Exactly, because it really
blurred the lines between a killer's authentic
communication and, well, a highly calculated
media hoax. OK, let's unpack this. To really
grasp the gravity of that little piece of cardboard,
we have to look at the mechanics of London's
communication network back in the autumn of 1888.
Right, because it wasn't just dropping a letter
in a local mailbox. Exactly. The central news
agency, which is who received this postcard,
wasn't just a local newspaper. It was a major
wire service. Oh, wow. So like. A huge hub. Yeah.
If a piece of sensational news landed on their
desks, it was immediately telegraphed to daily
papers across the entire country. I mean, that
structural detail really changes everything.
It does. The sender wasn't just hoping to spook
like a local beat cop. They were broadcasting
to the entire British empire. Yep. They understood
exactly how to get maximum amplification. And
to understand why this specific broadcast was
so incredibly effective. I want to read the verbatim
text from our source. Yeah, lay it on us. So
the postcard was postmarked October 1st, 1888,
and it reads, quote, I was not cutting dear old
boss when I gave you the tip. You'll hear about
Saucy Jackie's work tomorrow. Double event this
time. Number one squealed a bit. Couldn't finish
straight off. Had not time to get ears off for
police. Thanks for keeping last letter back till
I got to work again. It is so chilling. And then,
you know, it has that infamous signature, quote,
Jack the Ripper. The syntax itself is just incredibly
jarring. Yeah, it's so casual. Right. The author
uses this breezy, almost jovial, tone -like dear
old boss and saucy Jackie. While discussing the
brutal murder of human beings. Exactly. It mimics
the cadence of a coworker casually updating you
on some mundane office project. That's a great
way to put it. And the impact of that tone was
really amplified by the... totally chaotic environment
at Scotland Yard at the time. Oh, right. Because
they were basically dealing with the 1888 equivalent
of an unmoderated internet comment section. Pretty
much. I mean, they were receiving hundreds of
letters from random people claiming to be the
killer. A total Victorian spam filter nightmare.
Yeah. You have this mountain of trolls fighting
for attention right in the middle of the biggest
story in the world. But this particular postcard
somehow bypassed that filter. It did. The investigators
deemed it so potentially authentic that they
took the incredibly rare step of publishing a
facsimile of it, which was huge. They literally
printed copies of the killer's handwriting and
distributed it on broadsheets all across London,
just desperately hoping like a landlord or a
sibling would recognize the script. They were
really grasping at straws, but their desperation
was fueled by a very specific operational reason.
The text itself. Yeah. The postcard referenced
keeping the quote last letter back. Right. This
was a direct allusion to the Dear Boss letter,
which is another piece of correspondence they
received just days earlier. And the key thing
is, at the exact moment this postcard arrived
at the Central News Agency, the existence of
that previous Dear Boss letter was a closely
guarded police secret. Right. So the author knew
about a piece of evidence that hadn't been leaked
to the public yet. Which, I mean, that alone
would make any detective sit up in their chair.
Absolutely. But that takes us into the physical
crime scene itself. Yeah. Because the postcard
goes way beyond just referencing other male.
Yeah, it gets a lot more gruesome. It mentions
a double event, which we know refers to the murders
of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes. Both
killed in the early morning hours of September
30. Right. And then there is that incredibly
macabre apology. The author claims they didn't
have time to, quote, get ears off for police.
And that detail that is the mechanical linchpin
of the entire investigation at that time. Because
of what the medical examiners found. Exactly.
When they assessed Catherine Eddowes at the crime
scene, they documented these really severe facial
mutilations. Right. And among those injuries,
the lobe and the oracle of her right ear were
completely severed. Oh, man. However, the killer
had been interrupted, so they actually left the
severed pieces at the scene. So the freezing
on the postcard had not time to get ears off.
It perfectly aligns with the physical reality
of the crime scene. It's a perfect match. And
just like the previous letter, this gruesome
detail regarding the severed ear had been completely
held back from the press. Which, if we look at
standard investigative techniques, that is the
holy grail. Oh yeah. Held back information is
the ultimate tool to weed out false confessors.
Like if someone writes to you about a severed
ear and you have a victim in the morgue with
a severed ear, the case seems closed. It really
does. But I have to push back on this conclusion
based strictly on the timeline our sources provide.
Okay, let's hear it. So the double event murders
happened in the early morning of September 30.
Right. This postcard, however, was postmarked
on October 1st. Ah. That is a minimum of 24 to
30 hours after the killings. What's fascinating
here is how that 24 -hour window completely changes
the evidentiary value of the artifact. Because
it's a huge gap. Right. You are zeroing in on
the exact variable that shifts this from a definitively
closed case to a massive historical quagmire.
I mean, a 24 -hour gap in a densely populated,
highly agitated district like Whitechapel. That
is in eternity. Oh, completely. You have police
officers, mortuary workers, medical personnel,
local residents, all just swarming the area.
The idea that a detail as sensational as a severed
ear could remain completely contained for over
a day seems honestly highly improbable. It's
almost impossible. One mortuary assistant mentions
it at a pub. And by midnight, half the neighborhood
is whispering about it. Exactly. If the postcard
had been postmarked just, say, two hours after
the murders, before the bodies were even transported,
it would be ironclad proof of authorship. And
some historical authors do argue the timeline
is tight enough to support its authenticity,
right? They do. However, the delay introduces
a massive vulnerability in the police theory.
It really opens the door to the possibility that
the author was not the killer. Right. It could
have simply been an opportunistic observer who
heard a morbid rumor on the street and decided
to weaponize it. Which requires a staggering
level of cynicism. Oh, absolutely. I mean, someone
hears about a woman being brutally mutilated,
and their immediate instinct is to write a taunting
letter to a wire service pretending to be the
murderer. It's incredibly dark. But if we accept
the timeline allows for a hoaxer, we have to
look at motive. Who has the insider knowledge,
the writing skills to craft this specific persona,
and the direct line to the central news agency?
And that points the finger directly at the media
itself. Here's where it gets really interesting.
Yeah, because the landscape of the 19th century
penny press was just fiercely competitive. We
are talking about newspapers that relied entirely
on daily street sales. Right. There were no long
-term subscriptions protecting their bottom line
back then. They needed sensational headlines
every single day to survive. And an elusive,
taunting murderer was basically the most lucrative
narrative imaginable. And the police themselves
actually began to realize they were being played.
They did. According to our sources, senior Scotland
Yard officials eventually claimed to have identified
a specific journalist as the author of both The
Saucy Jack postcard and the Dear Boss letter.
Yeah. In 1913, Chief Inspector John Littlechild
explicitly stated that investigators believed
a journalist named Thomas J. Bulling, who was
often called Tom Bullin, was responsible for
the correspondence. And Bulling's employment
makes this theory incredibly compelling. Because
he didn't just work for any random newspaper.
He works for the Central News Agency. the very
organization that supposedly received these letters.
It's like the call is coming from inside the
house. Exactly. He didn't have to bypass police
security or mailroom clerks. He was already inside
the building. He had the perfect vantage point.
He could monitor incoming police intelligence,
intercept real news, and then just inject his
own manufactured drama directly into the national
wire. The audacity of that is just mind -boggling.
It really is. And the theory doesn't just rely
on the suspicions of a 1913 police inspector.
No, the source material jumps forward to 1931,
where we get an outright confession. Wait, really?
An actual confession? Yeah. A journalist named
Fred Bess, who worked for a highly sensationalist
paper called The Star, publicly claimed that
he and his colleague Tom Bullin wrote the entire
Jack the Ripper correspondence. Wow. And what
was their motive? To, quote, keep the business
alive. That is a phenomenal admission of manipulation.
Isn't it? They realized that a nameless, faceless
string of murders would eventually lose the public's
interest. But a theatrical villain who writes
letters to the police... mocks their incompetence
and uses a terrifying moniker. That guarantees
front -poached sales indefinitely. I just find
myself fixated on the mechanics of how they pulled
it off right under Scotland Yard's nose. Oh,
the logistics are fascinating. If Bullen is at
the wire service and Best is at the star, they
essentially have a symbiotic loop. Yeah, think
about it. Bullen creates the letter and puts
it on the wire. Then Best publishes it with massive
Screaming headlines the public panics the police
waste thousands of man hours hunting a phantom
and then best writes an editorial Slamming the
police for their failure. It's a completely self
-sustaining Ecosystem of manufactured outrage
if we connect this to the bigger picture. Yeah,
we are basically witnessing the birth of the
modern true crime industrial complex. Exactly.
The media didn't just observe and report on these
tragic events. They actively shaped the historical
narrative. They literally gave the killer his
voice and his name. Right. Before those letters,
Jack the Ripper did not exist. There was only
the Whitechapel murderer. Best in Bowling constructed
a mythos that completely hijacked the reality
of the crime. It totally recontextualizes the
entire case. But what's really incredible is
that this narrative isn't just relying on a 1931
confession from an aging journalist. No, we can
actually test this theory today. Yeah. Our sources
highlight a 2018 study by researcher Andrea Nini,
who applied modern forensic linguistics to this
19th century mystery. And the way this science
works on Victorian text is wild. Wait, how do
you even run forensics on text from that long
ago? Well, forensic linguistics looks past the
handwriting entirely. It analyzes the subconscious
syntactic DNA of the text. Syntactic DNA, like
the grammatical structure? Exactly. An algorithm
processes the structure of the sentences, the
choice of idioms, and the morphological quirks
of the author. Oh, wow. It's basically comparing
the architectural blueprints of how a specific
person builds a thought. And NeNe didn't just
look at the two famous letters, right? He ran
this analysis across a massive corpus of over
200 hoax letters from the era. Yeah, a huge sample
size. And the algorithm found that the Saucy
Jackie postcard and the Dear Boss letter shared
incredibly specific, highly improbable structural
similarities. Like what kind of similarities?
Things like the use of certain phrasal verbs
and identical grammatical habits. The algorithm
clustered these two texts together, distinctly
isolated from the rest of the hoax mail. So modern
linguistic algorithms effectively validated a
1930s journalist confession. did. The scientific
corroboration makes the journalist hoax theory
the most robust explanation we have. Because
the linguistic fingerprint shows one author crafted
the persona. Meaning the entire ripper correspondence
was likely a singular coordinated fabrication.
Which brings us to the most absurd twist in this
entire deep dive. Oh yeah, this is the craziest
part. We're using 21st century algorithmic analysis
to study the phrasing of a document that Scotland
Yard literally managed to lose. Yep. The physical
Saucy Jackie postcard is missing. It just vanished
from the police archives. The Dear Boss letter
was also lost for decades before being anonymously
returned in 1987, but the postcard remains a
ghost. How does a police force just lose the
most famous piece of evidence in their history?
Well, the archiving standards of the 1880s metropolitan
police were practically non -existent by modern
standards. Clearly. There was no rigorous chain
of custody. Crucial evidence was routinely pinned
to bulletin boards. Bulletin boards. Yeah. It
was passed around public houses by detectives
seeking leads and frequently taken home by retiring
officers as macabre souvenirs. That is unbelievable.
So we are running advanced scientific diagnostics
on photographs and facsimiles. Exactly. The only
reason we can even analyze the text today is
because the police were desperate enough in 1888
to print the killer's marketing material in the
Sunday papers. The irony is profound. It really
is. The very act that amplified the hoax is the
only reason the artifact survived in the historical
record. So what does this all mean? Big question.
We started by looking at a piece of cardboard
that seemed to offer a direct window into the
mind of a monster. Right. But as we map the timeline,
The 24 -hour delay in the postmark exposed a
fatal flaw. And then we uncovered the cutthroat
mechanics of the Victorian penny press. Where
journalists like Bullen and Best allegedly manufactured
a supervillain just to keep their printing presses
running. And we saw modern forensic linguistics
cut through the fog of history to link these
fabricated letters together. The Saucy Jackie
postcard is almost certainly not a killer's confession.
It is a masterful, cynical piece of media manipulation.
It serves as a stark historical precedent. We
frequently discuss the modern crisis of viral
misinformation and algorithm -driven clickbait.
Which feels like such a new problem. Right. But
this postcard proves that the weaponization of
false narratives for profit is fundamentally
baked into media history. A fake news story in
1888 was powerful enough to permanently derail
one of the largest police investigations in British
history. The technology to spread the lie has
evolved, but the human susceptibility to a terrifying
narrative hasn't changed a bit. This raises an
important question, one that forces us to rethink
the legacy of this entire era. If the famous
moniker Jack the Ripper and the taunting persona
were entirely invented by journalists trying
to keep the business alive, Does that mean the
most infamous serial killer in history is, in
a very real way, a fictional character? Just
overlaid onto a series of tragic, unsolved murders.
Exactly. I mean, our entire cultural archetype
of a serial killer, the blueprint for over a
century of true crime media, is based entirely
on a fabricated character. We remember Jack the
Ripper. We remember the Phantom villain, the
catchy moniker, and the taunting letters. But
in the process of mythologizing a piece of literal
junk mail, the actual tragic The true crime genre
was basically born by erasing the humanity of
the victims to make room for a fictionalized
comic book villain. Thank you for joining us
on this deep dive. Keep questioning the narrative.