Yet the initial placement of Smith as a Ripper victim is not all that surprising. She was a victim in Whitechapel, in the impoverished East End, where human life was cheap and murder not an unexpected event. Indeed, a second murder on Aug. 7 of Martha Tabram, also a prostitute, and killed in a manner closer to what came to be viewed as the Ripper style, remained for some time in the Ripper "canon," despite the fact that a bayonet was used, not a knife, and no strangulation was involved.
You could say that the Jack the Ripper case existed before it had even gotten started. Once Smith and Tabram had been killed, the police, the press and the public became attuned to the idea of a madman in their midst and alert to discovering a method to his madness.
Fascination with the violent death of prostitutes began to mount. After five subsequent horrific murders over the next three months - of Mary Nichols, Annie Chapman, Elizabeth Stride, Catherine Eddowes and Mary Kelly - all displaying marked similarities, Smith and Tabram were dropped by most official investigators from the list of Ripper victims.
And yet their initial inclusion in the case reflects a basic human need to find a pattern in a group of events and to link that pattern to a singular responsible agent.
As students of philosophy and literature, we have long been interested in what the Jack the Ripper case demonstrates about how we cope with the mysteries of life - how we try to arrange events, particularly violent ones, into coherent narratives, wrap them in a cloak of conspiracy, and turn them into myths.
