The alleged letter from the killer identifying himself as "Jack the Ripper" was likely a hoax.

The infamous murderer of prostitutes in the Whitechapel district of London eventually came to be known as “Jack the Ripper,” but in this sensational 1888 tabloid piece the killer is called “Leather Apron.” It’s a lot subtler name but just as chilling, I think. Whenever I hear about a violent crime–past or present–my first thought is always that all of the people involved, perpetrator and victims, were once sitting at desks in a second-grade classroom learning basic math and reading. I guess it’s just a way to suppress the horror.

The newspaper article is visually plain but makes up for its lack of eye-grabbing graphics with prose dripping with tawdry detail (some of which exaggerated the facts). An excerpt:

“Another murder of a character even more diabolical than that perpetrated Back’s Row, on Friday week, was discovered in the same neighborhood, on Saturday morning. At around six o’clock a woman was lying in a back yard at the foot of a passage leading to a lodging house in Old Brown’s Lane, Spitalfields. The house is occupied by a Mrs. Richardson, who lets it out to lodgers, and the door which admits to this passage, at the foot of which lies the yard where the body was found, is always open for the convenience of lodgers. A lodger named Davis was going down to work at the time mentioned and found the woman lying on her back close to the flight of steps leading into the yard. Her throat was cut in a fearful manner. The woman’s body had been completely ripped open and the heart and the other organs laying about the place, and portions of the entrails around the victim’s neck.”