Tom Holland

And so theories like these are obviously filling the vacuum left by the failure of the police to capture the Whitechapel murderer.

And I guess you could also say more precisely their failure to utilize the most up-to-date tools of detection.

Because again, we've been talking about this, that there are people saying you should be using, for instance, fingerprinting, which is just coming in at this time.

And the police won't, you know, they won't make that part of formal investigative procedure until the early 20th century.

And then there are others like bloodhounds that they completely, you know, they make an absolute horlicks of.

And I think that,

We've talked about how Sir Charles Warren, the head of the Met, resigns.

And he actually resigns on the 8th of November, which is one day before the murder of Mary Jane Kelly.

That even though this resignation is not directly linked to the Ripper murders, it does seem to critics of Scotland Yard to set the seal on the failure of the police.

And I think also it encourages...

amateur detectives to feel that they can do a much better job well the amateur detectives are clearly reflecting a climate in which people are distrustful of the police anyway for political reasons but they also see the police as incompetent don't they and there's a there's a sort of flood of amateur detectives yeah would be have a go heroes into white chapel yeah so there's um a director of the bank of england who disguised himself as a day laborer and kind of roamed the streets and there are detectives who emulate the policemen who dressed up as a woman

And they go around Whitechapel in drag.

The most notorious amateur detective who investigates the case is a prominent alienist.

So someone who deals with mental health problems called Littleton Forbes Winslow.

And he ran private asylums and was widely seen as a kind of leading expert on mental health.

And he was convinced that the Ripper was, in the technical language of the time, a lunatic.

And in fact, Winslow said that he knew who the Ripper was, but would never reveal it.

And it has to be said that Winslow and all the other amateur detectives are treated with complete contempt by the police.

they clearly see them as clowns.

Of course, there is one amateur detective who is not seen as a clown, and this is a fictional amateur detective, the most famous amateur detective of all time, who had made his debut in 1887 in a story called A Study in Scarlet.