Customer Reviews

Jack the Ripper: The Complete Casebook

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I found this book to be one of the most comprehensive on the subject I have ever read, and believe me, I have read them all. I have also had the great pleasure to accompany Mr. Rumbelow on one of his famous "Jack the Ripper" walking tours whilst in London and he is without a doubt one of the foremost experts in the field of "Ripperology" today!

This is easily the best book on Jack the Ripper I have read yet. Rumbelow adds a lot of background to the case study, including an early chapter on just how horrible the London slums were in Victorian times (far worse than anything out of Dickens). He also covers what the press and the police departments were doing as the case unfolded, which form interesting subplots of their own. The last half of the book is not quite as good as it wanders over a slew of suspects, a handful of later serial killers, and comments on a few media versions of the case. Still Rumbleow is thorough and objective and easily proves to be one of the leading Ripperologists working today.

This book opens your eyes with how far we've come in handling serial killers. Whether that's a good comment on our society or not-who knows. Looking at how they handled the case compared to what we know now, it's suprising they had a list of suspects! The book shows just how easy it is for a killer to happen as our cities get more & more crowded.

I've had the distinct pleasure of taking Rumbelow's "Jack the Ripper" walking tour and of meeting him at the "2002 Jack the Ripper Conference." He is indeed the leading expert on the Ripper. His book covers all factual aspects of the crimes in depth. He espouses no theory or suspect, believing that the Ripper was someone in the neighborhood who wasn't famous and who will never be discovered. I highly recommend this book as the very best on Jack the Ripper.

Rumbelow's Casebook is indeed very complete.
The opening chapters set the context of Whitechapel in East end of London at the time of the killings. The statistics of lifestyles at the end of the nineteenth century provided by Rumbelow is evidence A that he "did his homework" and researched his subject matter fully.
I am not usually a fan of true crime novels but had to get this book as Jack is such an infamous personage and wasn't disappointed. Rumbelow writes about the murders with passion without sensationalism that the book may have elicited in hands of another and describes the setting the lives of the victims, theories and letters from the Ripper and parrallel cases. This is probably the most complete book on Jack The Ripper and wholly lives up to its name as being the Complete Casebook so for anyone with at least passing interest in the Infamous Ripper I suggest they read this book to better understand the murders.

Having only a general knowledge of the ripper murders of the late 19th century, I was looking for a book that could fill in some of the details and distinguish between the known and the speculative. In this regards, the author succeeds. Mr. Rumbelow begins by giving us an overview of the East End in general and Whitechapel in particular since these are the areas in which the murders occurred. We learn about the population size, the number of poor, and other relevant socioeconomic facts. After this concise introduction to 1888 London and its environs, we move right into the murders themselves.

The author does a good job of distilling the facts associated with each of the five confirmed murders. We learn of the sad living conditions of the victims, their lowly states, and the brutality of their murders. We, of course, also learn a bit about Jack the Ripper along the way. The most definitive thing we learn is how he kills. To wit, he strangles his victims, puts them in a prone position, and then mutilates them with what is presumably a surgical knife of some kind. Somewhat surprisingly, it would seem that everything else that is related to the ripper lacks this kind of clarity. For example, although a general consensus exists that the killer had some anatomical knowledge and surgical skill, there is not complete unanimity by all that were involved in the case. Also, while newspapers and the police were flooded with letters claiming either to be the ripper or to know who he was, we know that only a couple of the letters are suspected to have actually come from the ripper himself. Do these letters, which were written in a coarse style, tell us the ripper was poorly educated or merely pretending to be so? If the former, then how does that square with the belief that the killer had anatomical and surgical skills? Could he have been a butcher of some kind? We just don't know and this book, unfortunately, can't tell us.

In addition to the murder details, we also learn of the intensive police investigation. The police were hamstrung at the time by the lack of scientific and forensic tools that we now possess. Remember that not only did DNA testing not exist; even blood typing had yet to make an appearance. Nonetheless, the police did what they could. Perhaps as a City of London policeman, Mr. Rumbelow is a bit biased, but he paints a picture of the police doing a competent job (informing the public, increasing patrols, setting traps, withholding key pieces of information, etc.) given the constraints they faced (e.g., territorial disputes between the city of London police and the Metropolitan police). However, this is not to say that no mistakes were made. One notable example is the Metropolitan police commissioner personally erasing a message that the ripper is believed to have scrawled on a wall for fear that anti-Jewish sentiment could spark a riot. While the message was written down, there is some question as to whether it was accurately transcribed. Had Sir Charles Warren been willing to wait just one hour more, a photograph could have been taken for later study.

It's really the second half of the book that falters and has given rise to my three star rating. Many pages are spent discussing seven suspects or so. While some discussion is warranted, the 100 pages seem excessive. This is especially so when you consider that we ultimately do not know the identity of the culprit and Mr. Rumbelow seems skeptical of the suspects that he presents. Additionally, the author spends a good deal of time discussing "ripper" murders that have occurred in the 20th century. The problem is that notwithstanding the fact that these killers may have been dubbed "rippers" by the press or public, they bear little resemblance to the 18th century East End killings. They may all have been serial killers, but the latter-day murderers did not confine themselves to one section of town, prey exclusively on prostitutes, or mutilate their victims in the way that the original ripper did. Taking all of this into consideration, the coverage of Jack the Stripper, the Dusseldorf Ripper, and the Yorkshire Ripper appears superfluous.

Despite the criticism, this is still a very good introduction to Jack the Ripper for those who have little or no knowledge of the specifics of the killings. This book was originally published in 1975 and the edition I read was from 1988. There are probably some Ripperologists who feel that a book of this vintage is outdated, but I'm not convinced we know much more now then we did twenty years ago. It's true that there have been those who claim to have discovered the identity of the real Jack the Ripper (notably Patricia Cornwell), but the suspects and a large portion of the evidence against them are included in this book and we still don't have any forensics to positively identify any person as the killer. Therefore, I recommend this book to those interested in the case, but I also caution that this is probably not a good read for the squeamish. Many of the killings are necessarily described in graphic fashion and there are even some morgue and crime scene photos.

This book is the best I have read on this subject. On my last trip to London I actually went on a tour with the author Donald Rumbelow. I bought the book from Donald at the end of the tour and he autographed it for me. Donald leads a London "Jack the Ripper" walk that far surpasses any other guided tour of any sort that I have ever been on. He knows his stuff, as you can see by reading the book. Donald is the Curator of the Police Crime Museum and a former Scotland Yard Detective. Anytime I go to London, which is about every couple of years, I have to go on a "Ripper" tour with Donald. Travel guides like Fodor's, Frommers, Eyewitness etc recommend the expert walking tour and his crime book. Donald's walking company site is "london.walks.com".

Part constable,part historian,Mr Rumbelow takes us on a thrilling ride of uptown and downtown Victorian London.

This was the first book I read on Jack the Ripper. It was well written, and I will have to agree with the other reviewer, the first part is the best. Rumbelow did a wonderful and skillful job in setting the mood for the things to come. He also does a great job in going into detail about the murders. However, as later writers have pointed out, he uses a lot of secondary sources, like made up newspaper accounts, and fiction from some of the early writers of Jack the Ripper. It's a good book to begin with, but don't believe everything in the book as being pure fact. The fact is, some of the sources he used were bad, or he only viewed them and then they vanished. It is still a very good book. However, I would suggest Jack the Ripper the complete history by Philip Sugden, over this one.

All you really want to know about the Whitechapple crimes, without any of the b.s. theories, just the facts, written like a thriller novel. A must buy! True crime classic!