Richard Charles Cobb

On the Trail of Jack the Ripper

FOR 134 YEARS, THE MURDERS committed in London’s East End by the infamous ‘Jack the Ripper’ have baffled the world. The Ripper murders commenced in August and continued freely until the beginning of November 1888 when inexplicably the murders stopped. Five women were brutally murdered and savagely mutilated in and around Whitechapel. The killer was never caught despite the very best intentions of the police and thousands of would-be detectives following his trail. Since 1888, much has changed and the crime scene locations known to the Ripper and his victims would be quite unrecognisable to them now. Equally, to the modern-day Londoner or visitor, the locations would remain largely unknown…until now. True crime and social historians Richard C Cobb and Mark Davis return to the Whitechapel of 1888 to see what remains from this dark time in London’s history and to take the reader on a step-by-step tour of the modern world of Jack the Ripper. Using the original police reports, state of the art photographs, unseen images and diagrams, they present the truth about what actually happened in the autumn of 1888 and take a look at other victims that may have been killed by the same man. Cobb and Davis give the reader a real sense of how the past meets the present in arguably London’s most vibrant and cultural quarter - where the shadow of the Ripper is never too far away.