Jack the Ripper suspects

The six other murders—those of Emma Elizabeth Smith, Martha Tabram, Rose Mylett, Alice McKenzie, Frances Coles, and the Pinchin Street torso—have been linked with the Ripper to varying degrees.

The swiftness of the attacks and the manner of the mutilations performed on some of the bodies, which included disembowelment and removal of organs, led to speculation that the murderer had the skills of a physician or butcher.

Montague John Druitt (15 August 1857 – early December 1888) was a Dorset-born barrister who worked to supplement his income as an assistant schoolmaster in Blackheath, London, until his dismissal shortly before his suicide by drowning in 1888.

[12] His death shortly after the last canonical murder (which took place on 9 November 1888) led Assistant Chief Constable Sir Melville Macnaghten to name him as a suspect in a memorandum of 23 February 1894.

Isenschmid's wife told police that he was violent and erratic, that he always carried large knives (even when they were not required for his trade), that he had threatened to kill her on at least one occasion, and that he had left home for no reason two months ago and returned only sporadically.

[29] In his book The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI profiler John E. Douglas stated that a paranoid individual such as Kosminski would likely have openly boasted of the murders while incarcerated had he been the killer, but there is no record that he ever did so.

[32][33] Many consider it conjecture without substantial evidence that the shawl, allegedly taken from the crime scene by police constable Amos Simpson, even belonged to Eddowes—who was impoverished and arguably could not have afforded to purchase it herself.

[54] Francis Tumblety (c. 1833 – 1903) earned a small fortune posing as an "Indian Herb" doctor throughout the United States and Canada and was commonly perceived as a misogynist and a quack.

[66] For example, at the time of the murders, Richard Mansfield, a famous actor, starred in a theatrical version of Robert Louis Stevenson's book Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

[67] William Henry Bury (25 May 1859 – 24 April 1889) had recently moved to Dundee from the East End of London, when he strangled his wife Ellen Elliott, a former prostitute, on 4 February 1889.

[91] Carl Ferdinand Feigenbaum (alias Anton Zahn; 1840 – 27 April 1896) was a German merchant seaman arrested in 1894 in New York City for cutting the throat of Mrs Juliana Hoffmann.

[93] Xanthé Mallett, a Scottish forensic anthropologist and criminologist who investigated the case in 2011, wrote there is considerable doubt that all of the Jack the Ripper murders were committed by the same person.

[100] Suspects proposed years after the murders include virtually anyone remotely connected to the case by contemporary documents, as well as many famous names, who were not considered in the police investigation at all.

[3] Most of their suggestions cannot be taken seriously,[3] and include English novelist George Gissing, British prime minister William Ewart Gladstone, and syphilitic artist Frank Miles.

[102][103] The theory was brought to major public attention in 1970 when an article by Stowell was published in The Criminologist that revealed his suspicion that Prince Albert Victor had committed the murders after being driven mad by syphilis.

"[106] Subsequently, conspiracy theorists, such as Stephen Knight in Jack the Ripper: The Final Solution, have elaborated on the supposed involvement of Prince Albert Victor in the murders.

[107] Variations of the theory involve the physician William Gull, the artist Walter Sickert, and the poet James Kenneth Stephen to greater or lesser degrees, and have been fictionalised in novels and films, such as Murder by Decree and From Hell.

Joseph Barnett (c. 1858–1927) was a former fish porter, and victim Mary Kelly's lover from 8 April 1887 to 30 October 1888, when they quarrelled and separated after he lost his job and she returned to prostitution to make a living.

[113][114] William Berry "Willy" Clarkson (1861 – 12 October 1934) was the royal wigmaker and costume-maker to Queen Victoria and lived approximately two miles (3.2 km) from each of the canonical five crime scenes.

Evidence presented to support the theory of Clarkson as a suspect included the revelation that he admitted one of his custom-made wigs was found near the scene of one of the Ripper killings, a fact not previously widely known in the "ripperology" community.

[121] In his book The Cases That Haunt Us, former FBI criminal profiler John Douglas asserted that behavioural clues gathered from the murders all point to a person "known to the police as David Cohen ... or someone very much like him".

Bax Horton argued that the crimes coincided with his mental and physical decline which started when he broke his left arm in February 1888 and ended before his incarceration in September 1889 in the Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum, where he remained until his death in 1913.

Le Queux claimed to have seen a manuscript in French written by Rasputin stating that Jack the Ripper was an insane Russian doctor named Alexander Pedachenko, an agent of the Okhrana (the Secret Police of Imperial Russia), whose aim in committing the murders was to discredit Scotland Yard.

[165] In 2005, Matthew Sturgis included a lengthy "Postscript" in his substantial biography of the artist, exploring Cornwell's and others' claims; it begins, "Walter Sickert was not Jack the Ripper".

[188] The authors claim that the victims knew the doctor personally, that they were killed and mutilated in an attempt to research the causes of infertility, and that a badly blunted surgical knife, which belonged to Williams, was the murder weapon.

[190] Williams's wife, Lizzie, was named as a possible suspect by author John Morris, who claims that she was unable to have children and, in an unhinged state, took revenge on those who could by killing them.

"[193] Other named suspects include German hairdresser Charles Ludwig, apothecary and mental patient Oswald Puckridge (1838–1900), insane medical student John Sanders (1862–1901), Swedish tramp Nikaner Benelius, and even social reformer Thomas Barnardo, who claimed he had met one of the victims (Elizabeth Stride) shortly before her murder.

[200] Named suspects who may be entirely fictional include "Dr Stanley",[201] cult leader Nicolai Vasiliev,[202] Norwegian sailor "Fogelma",[203] and Russian needlewoman Olga Tchkersoff,[204] as well as the aforementioned Alexander Pedachenko.

[214] Author Frank Pearse, who purports to have access to a written confession, argues that the murders were performed by a man named John Pavitt Sawyer (who held multiple similarities, such as residence and profession, to alternate suspect George Chapman), as part of an occult Freemason initiation.

[citation needed] In 2023, historian Rod Beattie proposed police officer Bowden Endacott, who had previously been demoted and reassigned to guarding the British Museum after falsely accusing a woman named Elizabeth Cass of being a prostitute.