Tom Holland

So as Philip Sugden puts it, Hutchinson has been widely described by students of the case as the witness most likely to have met Jack the Ripper.

And this was certainly what Inspector Abberline seems briefly to have hoped.

Because in the report that Hutchinson gave of the man that he had seen, there was this phrase can be identified right at the end.

And you can imagine Abberline's hopes soaring when he read that.

Yeah.

It is evident that Abberline had very quickly lost confidence in Hutchinson.

And so people may wonder why.

So I think there are two possible theories.

So the first is given by Donald Rumbelow in his book, The Complete Jack the Ripper.

And Rumbelow wrote, Hutchinson said the suspect lived in the area and thought that he had seen him in Petticoat Lane Market, so very close to Rumbelow.

to the murder site on a Sunday morning possibly he did and I suspect that the man was probably a street trader somebody Hutchinson knew by sight if not by name and giving his description was an act of spiteful resentment or jealousy on his part at the man's sexual friendship with Kelly this suspect seems to have been identified and both he and Hutchinson are quickly dropped from the investigation

And he's basically just making stuff up.

So he is projecting onto the man that he saw talking to Mary Jane, if he saw anyone at all, his sense of what the Ripper should have looked like.

And just to quote Judith Valkovitz, who wrote a wonderful book on all this called City of Dreadful Delight, which I highly recommend.

She says that Hutchinson's description carefully replicated the costume and stance of the classic stage villain, sinister, black-moustached, bejeweled and arrogant, who manipulated his privilege and wealth to despoil the vulnerable daughters of the people.

So in other words, even before the Ripper's reign of terror has ended, he's already well on his way to becoming something more than just a figure of flesh and blood.

He's becoming essentially a kind of a myth.

Yes.

And this is an allusion to the great literary sensation of the 1880s, which was The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson, still an incredibly famous novella.

It had been published two years earlier in 1886.