With no telephones yet available in Victorian England — at the time, there weren’t even electric street lights — another factor that may have helped Jack the Ripper to strike with anonymity — letter writing was the chief mode of communication among both regular people and the professional classes. Letters allowed people to communicate with both the press and the police with potential clues and pieces of useful information that would help identify the killer.
However, the mail also became a major source of confusion and red herrings, with the police reportedly contending with hundreds of pieces of unexpected correspondence concerning the case. Things really came to a head in late September and early October 1888, when London’s Central News Agency received a letter postcard — the latter of which was seemingly smeared with blood — purporting to be from Jack the Ripper, who promised to keep on killing until he was caught. The correspondence has never been confirmed as truly being the killer’s, though it generated a great deal of copycat letters that muddled the investigation further.
Things took yet another dark turn when the head of a vigilante group, the Whitechapel Vigilance Committee, received a letter from the apparent killer that arrived with half of a human kidney. Though some investigators have since claimed that some of these deliveries may have come from the real Jack the Ripper, none have ever led to the killer being positively identified, and some believe they may have been the work of journalists keen to keep the lucrative story in the public eye, per Smithsonian.
